2010.12.15
Days Remaining: 167
01. My Philosophy of Religion class's final essay for the semester is to take any one of the (roughly 2 or 3 dozen) short essays we've read (all written by philosophers of religion, of course) and apply it to Santa Claus instead of to God. This is partly to illustrate a point I've made throughout the semester: that what we call "philosophy of religion" is really "Christian theology with the word 'Jesus' swapped out for the more generic 'God.'" This beggars the field, as most of what it struggles with is informed entirely by Christian tradition (with occasional parallels drawn from Jewish and Muslim philosophy, which is just cheating because they're all so closely related in historical terms). So the final essay is meant to show how problematic this all is if you apply it to a supernatural figure who isn't a crypto-version of the Christian God.
02. So far the students have been variously interested or excited by the topic, and I've had a few people send me ideas or the beginnings of drafts. This evening I received a series of preliminary notes and observations (not a draft yet) from one of my students who took the class with some trepidation because she'd never taken a philosophy course before. But she persevered through it, met with me several times outside of class to talk about what we were going over, sent me drafts of each essay asking for feedback, and she has a very solid B for the class (and I'm a hard grader). Her preliminary notes are for an essay applying Kierkegaard's idea of the leap of faith to Chris Van Allsburg's book The Polar Express. I laughed so hard I cried when I read her ideas, because it's brilliant. That book is, entirely unknown to me, almost audibly crying out for a Kierkegaardian analysis, and my student caught on and is writing that analysis. I love when my students do this sort of thing: suddenly use what they get in class to reveal entire new perspectives on the world around them. It's one of the nicest birthday presents I could have asked for.
I think that's a really cool assignment. Glad she "got it."
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