Topic for Essay I, REL399 Religion, Love, & Death: East & West

Due Wednesday, April 1, 1:00 p.m., submit to "Assignments" on Canvas.

• Double-spaced, 1-2 pages. Ungraded but required. Submit as a Word Processing document (Word, Google doc, Pages, etc.), NOT as a PDF.
  
• Be sure to write your name, the name of the class, course number and term, and identify as "Essay 1." Be sure to give a title to your paper.
  
• I also strongly encourage you to read the essays on my Writing web pages, especially "Four Keys to Writing in the Humanities," "Paper Writing Guidelines," "Checklist for Papers," and "Writing: The Bridge between Consciousness and Unconsciousness."
• In addition, I strongly encourage you to use Grammerly: There are free versions for Windows and online for Mac users. This is a robust grammar and style checker.
  

Assignment

There is no need to incorporate ideas from any of the assigned readings for this course. This essay is meant to provide an initial point of reference for you thinking.

Write a story in the first person voice or in the third person, either fiction or non-fiction. You can adopt or adapt from an existence source: a character in a novel, play, short story, or film; a personage from a memoir, autobiography, documentary; your own life or someone you know.

You will describe how the character or person you have selected has faced or faces a difficult situation or experience involving two of the following three themes: love, death, and religion. "Love" can be family, romantic, and/or social/friendship. "Death" can be physical, social, and/or spiritual. The difficult situation or experience can involve any theme, such as: loss, death, separation; prejudice and discrimination; identity questioning; change in career or relationships.

Describe how the situation, experience, person, or circumstances the character/person you have selected finds that they cannot "go back to the way things were." In addition, discuss how the story they had told about themselves no longer seems to work, does not fit into usual social expectations, and/or does not fit into the pre-existent stories of the dominant culture.

End with some questions or speculation about where the story might go, or how the character/person's story might change, transform, or be renewed.