I always thought that Christianity and Judiasm were the same thing, with the only exception being Christians believed that Jesus came and died and rose again. In 2 days of Intro. to Religion, my mind has be blown. They are nothing the same. Most of the things that Christians celebrate they stole for the Jews and renamed. I was also a believer that hanakuh was the Jewish way to celebrate Christmas since they didn’t have one, but I had no idea that it happened long before the birth of Christ. I was also surprised to find out that jewish people celebrate a completely different new year than we did. I knew that other countries had diffent ones but I didn’t know that religions did to. I knew that there were church years for christians but we never treat them like new years day. These differences between the religions surprise me more and more with the more i find out.

After finishing the book, a thought came to me. How can you spend a whole semester at a school, buy into what they are teaching there, leave, and then take only prayer back to Brown with you. Not the prayer is a bad thing, but you would think bigger things would come from it. In the book, he went and joined the Thomas Road Baptist Church choir and it was the highlight of his weeks there. It went from being something to fill time to being something that was a big part of his life. There is the church service also. When he first went there, he would find his mind wondering and have to find ways to fill time, but by the end of the book, he was paying attention to the services and following along with what the sermon was saying. Even the classes were beginning to change him. At first, he dissagreed with what his proffesors were trying to teach him, but by the end, he was agreeing with some of it. And the trip to Florida, for not being a hardcore christian, to feel the pain of rejection over and over again and trying to convert people had to have changed him a little bit. I just can’t seem to figure out how he could waste all that time there when he was just going to go back to Brown and revert to all his old habits and ideals. I feel he could have better spent his time going to church for 1 Sunday and learning how to pray if that was all he was going to get out of it.

A movie I thought of with the Turner model was Castaway. In the movie, Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks, is a FedEx employee who’s plane crashes in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and he floats to island where he has to set up a completely different life and find a way to survive on his own. While there he creates a new friend out of a volleyball which he calls Wilson. After some time, he make a raft and floats away onto the ocean. He goes through a giant storm, where he loses Wilson, and then decides to give up. Just as he decides that, a cruise ship sails up along side of him and picks him up. He then goes back to his home, where he finds out that nothing is the same as it used to be. The movie ends with Chuck at an intersection, trying to decide which road to take.

The reason the Turner model made me think of this movie is because Chuck makes the entire path around the model. It starts with him being thrust out out of his normal world and crossing the line of Liminality when his plane crashes. He gets on this island where nothing is familiar and its all a new experience, the anti-stucture. Then he makes a new friend and begins to find the island as his home, forming his new communitas. He then has his metephorical death while lying on the raft in the middle of the ocean before getting picked up by the cruise ship. After getting picked up he goes back to his own life to find that nothing is the same and will never be the same. He is a different person and everyone he knew isn’t the way he remember them to be. Making the whole circle of the Turner Model. You could almost say that Tom Hanks went on his own little pilgrimage in the movie Castaway.

My dream job would be an 8th grade teacher in a school somewhere around the northwest Iowa area. I love the northwest Iowa area and would love to stay here as long as I possible could. Along with teaching the 8th grade, I would love to coach baseball and cross country for the school because I love both sports. To achieve this goal, I first need to graduate college with my Elementary Education degree and my coaching endorsment. I also will be getting my special education endorsment and my middle school endorsment as well. Alex Watters’ speech was very entertaining to me. He gave us very good advice and ideas to help us through our freshman and all 4 college years. When he said to network yourself and get to know as many people who know people as you can, I thought about it and agreed with him. If you know alot of people who know people, when your employer is asking around about you he will have a lot of people he can talk to. If you have a good reputation with them, you have nothing to worry about because there is enough good things said about you to get you hired. I also agree with him saying that we need to find things to put on your resume in your first year. If you find things now, you can just build upon them in the future. Maybe some of the activites have advancement opportunities for the following years, or they have groups asking for help that can be placed on a resume. If you show that you did things your freshman year, it also shows employers that you were active from the very begining. That is why you should be networked and look for resume builders early.

Religion is a touchy subject for alot of people. For some, religion is something that means the world to them and everything they do revolves around it. For others, it’s there but not always in the front of their minds. And then there are some who completely reject religion and want nothing to do with it. With all these different views of religion, naturally, there would be many different ways to define it. Some say its what and how they believe. Others say it’s there morals or beliefs. For me, I define religion as a system or set of beliefs that define who I am and the way I conduct myself. We learned in class though that there is no right or wrong way to define religion. We read about four different people who all defined religion in a differnent way. Some we agree with, some we don’t. Regardless of if we agree with them or not, I think that it is important that we are open to their definitions and look at them critically to help analyze our own definition and continue to develop it.