You may return to the course syllabus.

First Examination

Your examination essay must be sent to my e-mail address (owenjack@fs.isu.edu) by 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 14 February 1995. The format of the file should either be ASCII (like a regular e-mail message) or WordPerfect 5.1 or below. If you use WordPerfect 6.0 or some other wordprocessing application, use the option to save the file in ASCII format. That way, I can read your text in any form I wish and can return it to you, with my comments, as a simple e-mail message, which you can then read in any form you wish.

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

The abilities to follow instructions and finish on time are parts of this examination. Be sure to organize your essay. You may use other sources, but what you write must start from an understanding of the assigned readings. Make sure to cite the sources of any words, information, and ideas which are not your own (including those of other students). As necessary, refer to the pages on plagiarism and on citation style that are on my web site. The course style is required.

ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Robert Markus claims, in his The End of Ancient Christianity (1990), that the book focuses on the central question, "what was the nature of the changes that transformed the intellectual and the spiritual horizons of the Christian world between around AD 400 and 600?" (xii). You are to write an essay in which you do the following: 1) explain what these changes were; 2) using the theoretical approach of Jeffrey C. Alexander, explain why these changes took place. Where possible, make use of the comparative cases Markus defines, but feel free to bring in any other comparative cases that will help you explain the changes that took place in the western Christian world between the ages of Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great.

Revised: 22 December 1996

URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/rrc/oldfexam.html