Religion and Church of Scientology in the News

One of the objectives of this course is to witness the role and prevalence of various religions in American culture. To achieve this goal, students will seek out stories (news, art, music, film, etc.) that illustrate this interaction.

Specifically, students choose a group/topic (i.e., Religion and Church of Scientology in the News) and they will be asked to complete the following:

I will create a Wiki page for each group/topic within BlackBoard. Students need to decide upon a topic relating religion to some aspect of culture (i.e., Islam and Education; Scientology and Tax Status; Christian Fundamentalism and Evolution). I will have created the Wiki pages for a number of different religions. Any additional religions students would like to pursue is in the final “other religions” category.
Students will build out the Wiki page highlighting articles, images, links, etc. relating to their chosen religion.
1. The articles should be either from academic journals or “reputable sources”such as news magazines (i.e., Time) or newspapers (i.e., Washington Post). This means no blogs, no wikipedia, etc. If you have a question on sources, let me know.
2. Each entry will have 4 components:
  1. Bibliographic information (in proper formatting)
  2. Summary of the piece
  3. How the piece relates to the overall topic and your commentary
  4. Your initials/name
3. You can use the wiki page just as a word document. Edit the page and then save the page.
Each student is responsible for contributing 2 articles/summaries under the same religion. If the article has already been used, students need to find a different one.

Here are the 6 religions/topics to begin: