Second term paper topic post

Sorry I've been so silent about possible term paper projects on here. The first part of your term paper, a wikipedia article contribution (not necessarily a whole new article) summarizing the book or articles you've read for your paper, is due March 31. Therefore you should be picking a topic and sources in the next week and a half or so to give you time to read and summarize before then. For the wikipedia part, you should give me the name of the source(s), a printout of the article before your contribution, and a printout of your article afterwards. I'll post about the details of how to compose and post a wikipedia contribution on here soon; for now you need to worry about picking a topic and book.

There are only three real requirements for your term paper:
1. You have to read something substantive that isn't on the syllabus.
2. The topic has to have something to do with theology (but needn't be directly related to anything we've discussed in class).
3. You must be interested in the project.

There are a lot of possible ways for initially developing a topic. The easiest, clearly, is finding yourself intrigued by something we've read about or discussed in class and trying to do some research to learn more about it. This is a pretty passive process. If that hasn't worked for you so far, you might think about whether there's anything about theology or religion that you've always wondered about or found interesting and you could come to me to find out more about it.

Still stuck? You might try browsing wikipedia. Start with something really vague like Christianity and start following links until you either find an interesting topic (then check the references!) or find a stub that you'd be interested in enlarging (and voila you have your wikipedia article project).

Nothing there either? Do you have a favorite novel or film that seems to have a religious tone or theme to it you'd like to analyze? You'll have to read a little bit of secondary information to analyze it properly, but this is totally a doable project.

Once you have a topic, check out wikipedia for possible sources (but remember you have to find something to contribute). Proceed to the ND library website and search the catalog for your topic. If this doesn't turn up something interesting (or even if it does but you're still not sure) you should try the ATLA religion article database (it's got really good results, some of which you can access right from your web browser). Oddly, you can't put phrases in the boxes in this search engine. For safety, restrict yourself to one word per search box. Despite this peculiarity, it's a great resource. If you find 4 or so articles on the same topic, you can use them in place of a book.

Send me your topic and bibliography (it's not on the syllabus, but you'd better do this before you spend a ton of time reading, just in case). Find a wikipedia article or stub that's relevant. Read your works. Take notes and make a summary of the things you've read to contribute to wikipedia. Then, think about relating the stuff you've read in the book/article to what we've done in class. Critique it. Compare it. Relate it to some Biblical passage or theological concept. Talk about its historical context, if you want. You can do any or several of these things (probably not all of them, in an 8-10 page paper!), but you can't turn in just a summary of your reading for the first paper.

Then I'll return your paper with either some suggestions (if it's great) or detailed explanation of where you need to improve (if it's not so great). You will incorporate these and cut down the paper to 6 pages or less. (Cut out the fluff sentences!) The better the first version you turn in, the more helpful my comments will be and the better the final version will be (and thus the better your grade). But if you mess up on the first version, it's not the end of the world because you can improve it before your final submission.

Please be helpful by submitting the best work you can for the first version. Remember I have to grade fifty of these and I don't want to have to correct everybody's grammar -- the purpose of the revision is so you can learn more about the writing process: how to structure an argument, make a really convincing point, use quotations effectively. I'm going to spend a lot of hours doing this for you guys and I don't mind it -- but I want to spend them doing things that actually help you all become the best students and theologians you can be.

Tomorrow, a list of possible paper topics.