On this page you will find the syllabus for J. B. Owens's spring 1997 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course RELIGIOUS REFORMATION AND CONFLICT. To move to other pages, indicated in this text by special highlighted areas, use your mouse or hit the Enter key when the cursor is in one of these areas, depending on the type of browser you are using. If you need to contact me, you may send a message to my e-mail address (owenjack@isu.edu) or do so now by activating this button: Mail Now. Please be sure to include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
NOTE: For your own good, no one who expects to do well in this course should be carrying over 16 credit-hours this semester, fewer if you are working more than 10 hours per week.
NOTE: The PREREQUISITE for the course is History 101, "The Foundation of Western Civilization," or its equivalent.
NOTE: You must have obtained the required ISU computer account before the class session on Tuesday, 21 January. If you have not done so, you will be required to drop the course.
Try to answer my questions. Ask your own questions, even if you feel you must start by saying, "This may sound silly/dumb, but...?" To increase your understanding, you must start from what you understand now.
The question will not strike me as silly or dumb, although I may respond with a question. I propose to draw you into a dialogue. In return you should draw me, and your fellow students, into a dialogue. If you let me, I will even turn your examination essays and paper into dialogues, in which you can participate to improve the quality, and therefore the grade, of your work (see below).
I have designed this course to promote such an active and intense dialogue. We must have this dialogue as we will be discussing one of the most crucial issues of our time: human action informed by religious perspectives. The focus of our discussion will be five important, exciting books, four of them on the Reformation period of European history, when communities faced each other across the divide between different religious positions. The results were seldom pretty. We can learn much from the comparative study of human action informed by religious perspectives.
You should be aware that the addition of several thousand volumes on the History of Religion from the personal library of the late Glenn E. Tyler to the Glenn E. Tyler Collection of the ISU library has greatly enhanced the campus environment for your work in this course.
All examination essays must start from an understanding of the assigned readings. You may consult any books, articles, or notes you wish in developing your essays. However, you must cite properly any words or ideas that are not your own, and to see the form in which this citation is to be done, you should consult the Course Style Sheet. Be sure to employ the style and spell-check functions of your wordprocessor as these are important learning tools. About the third time you correct a grammatical or stylistic problem, you will never make the mistake again. Look at the evaluation standards for essays.
Each examination will be worth (very roughly) 15-20% of your final grade. Questions? Please put your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
Since you may have to use the interlibrary loan facilities of the Eli M. Oboler Library to get information, you will need to pick your topic and begin work quickly. A written statement explaining the cases you have chosen to compare must be sent to my e-mail address by 3:00 pm on Tuesday, 28 January and a preliminary bibliography for your project must be sent to my e-mail address by 3:00 pm on Tuesday, 4 February.
We will discuss the project on Tuesday, 21 January, including the pages on essay evaluation standards, on bibliography and citation style, and on plagiarism, and this discussion will be more useful to you if you have already thought about several possible cases that interest you. In any event, you must have read the project page and related material, and you must come with appropriate questions.
Throughout the course, this Hypothesis and its constituent factors should be a frequent focus of our livewire (in class) and on-line discussions. Make sure you know what it means and how it can be applied to the analysis of particular situations.
Questions? Please put your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
I will be happy to raise queries in the texts of your first two examinations and, if they are submitted sufficiently before the due date, of your project paper and third examination. You may then rewrite your essays and paper to respond to these queries (as well as dealing with flaws of style and content), improving the quality of what you have written and earning a higher grade. You should clarify with me the meaning of my queries before you begin your revisions. If you are already aware of writing problems, you are encouraged to make use of the university's free writing lab for assistance both during the preparation of the first version of the paper and during any revisions. There will be no limit to the number of times you can rewrite your essays.
The Markus, Clendinnen, and Kagan books are on library reserve and can be checked out at the main desk. If you use the reserve copies, photocopy the sections for each class session so that you can record in the margins your dialogue with the text.
Of course, I will spend substantial amounts of time both before and after your class sessions in room 344 of the Liberal Arts Building. Yet we both know that often our schedules will not mesh sufficiently for us to have adequate time to sit down for a discussion of your ideas, questions, and writing. The solution: Send your ideas, questions, and writing problems to my e-mail address (owenjack@isu.edu), and I promise to respond just as soon as I can. Moreover, by handling the matter in this way, I will have more time to consider what you are saying, check on facts and bibliography, and respond clearly in writing so that you will have a record (I will keep one too).
But it gets better than this. Naturally, I will respond to anything of a personal nature with an individual response to you alone. However, many of the questions and comments I will get, about the Project Hypothesis for example, will be of importance to everyone in the class, and I will, therefore, post your message and my response to everyone. That way I, and you, will derive much more benefit from my interactions with students outside of class. We will be able to have this type of communication because we will all be members of an on-line discussion list, to which I now turn.
Your participation in the dialogue of the list will be an important component of your grade in the course. Fifty (50) of the assignments listed in the reading assignments section are marked with an asterisk (*). As a minimum, you are required to submit THREE (3) questions or comments (in three separate messages) about twenty (20) of these by 3:00 pm on the day when they will be discussed. Because I will not necessarily respond to all of these questions, you are encouraged to help each other (remember that this is part of your grade).
Your participation in the dialogue of the list will be 15% of your final grade. Therefore, you can seek the assistance you need and get credit for it, and you can do so in a way that is compatible with your schedule and life-style. You must RESPOND PROMPTLY (within 72 hours) to any on-line questions I ask you.
Since Internet discussion lists are rapidly becoming a major component of the activity in all fields, you must learn how to use them well. For suggestions on how to ensure the high quality of your messages and of the responses to them, turn to the page on Using Lists Effectively. You may also find it intellectually useful and stimulating to join a relevant international list, at least as an observer (a "lurker" in Internet language), and you will find sources of lists of these lists on the page on Scholarly Links of Interest.
CONSIDER: "One of the most significant facts about us may finally be
that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds
of life but end in the end having lived only one."
- Clifford Geertz
Questions? Please include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
All contents copyright © 1996-2000. J. B. Owens All rights reserved.Revised: 7 November 2000
URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/rrc/syllabus.html