A Little More on Place

I just wanted to give a little bit of meta-narrative about the project we worked on today in class with Tina. Remember that this class is called "Religion and Environment," environment meaning more than plants and rivers and trees, but encompassing what surrounds us. Today's exercise and reading was part of pushing how we normally think of environment...and so, for this class, how we think of environment and religion. I asked you to think about a place that has spiritual significance for you. And so I asked you to think about how, in your own life, environment and "religion" come together for you. I put religion in quotation marks, because not all of us are "religious" but still knew what it meant to think about and write about a place that had deep meaning for us, whether is was a black box theater, a pizzeria, our grandparents' house, a place of worship, the passenger seat of a car, or a natural environment. All of these places are also "environments" and they impact how each of us think about our own spirituality, much like we see Kathleen Norris coming to understand how Dakota points her to understand her own spirituality better. In further thinking of citing these places, we had to go deeper into thinking about how they help shape our spirituality, asking questions about who the "author" is, what the "title" is, what the"year of publication" is. On top of that it also gave us a moment to think more philosophically about citations themselves, why they are important and what information goes in them.

I didn't have time to explain all of this before we left class, but I wanted to make sure you got the context and significance about what we were up to today.