Some term paper topic ideas

This post is about sparking your creativity to develop a term paper project.

I'm going to concentrate here on three possible projects: Biblical interpretation, classic theology text, or novel/film analysis.

1. Biblical interpretation. Let's say you have a favorite passage or Biblical book that we didn't cover (or didn't satisfy you on) in class. Take Job for example. I like Job.

I happen to know that form criticism has established that there are two oral layers in Job. One is a folk tale in which Job gets cursed by Satan (who has God's permission) so that he loses all his possessions and family, but refuses to renounce God. This folk tale is interrupted at this point by the second oral layer, which is a philosophical poem about suffering and God's will. In this layer, Job's friends offer a lot of possible explanations for his bad luck, all of which make it his fault he suffers. He rejects them all. In the end of this poem, God himself appears to Job, but instead of giving a sufficient explanation for why Job has suffered, he merely affirms that Job is insufficient to understand him. Job takes God's presence as a sufficient answer, concluding "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." At this point the folk tale resumes, and God restores Job to double his original prosperity as a reward for his faithfulness.

One possible project here might use the form criticism to look at these two layers and discuss how the "happy ending" is different in each. There are other possible projects here too: how did these two pieces come to be associated? Canonical criticism on how Job is interpreted later, etc.

Revelation is another great candidate for such a project because it's so symbolically loaded. Same for Daniel. You could also compare/contrast one of the letters in the New Testament written by Paul to one of the ones merely attributed to him. There are many, many Psalms that you could do a canonical criticism project on similar to our discussion of Psalm 110 in class. Let me know if you are interested in any of these projects.

2. Classic theology text. This is a fairly straightforward project. You read a classic theology text and use it to post to wikipedia on something relevant. Then you take one aspect of the book to talk about in your paper. Christology, in almost every case, would be a great choice: every classic Christian text has something to do with who Christ is, and we're getting a lot of tools for discussing it in class.

The, the classic text for this would be Augustine's Confessions. It's an autobiography (though with substantial digressions) so it's a relatively familiar form, and it's had an almost unparalleled impact on subsequent theology and literature in the Western world. Depending on your interest, you could also read a book by another patristic writer, a medieval or Reformation-era mystic, or a modern writer.

In the latter category I particularly want to mention Teilhard de Chardin. A Jesuit paleontologist working in the first half of the 20th century, he developed a theological perspective on evolution that has been influential not only within the church, but also outside it (to my knowledge, he is the only modern theologian ever mentioned in science fiction books). Since a lot of you are science majors and have expressed some interest in the relationship between science and theology, this might interest you. The orthodoxy of some of Teilhard's work is still being debated. I haven't read any of his books but have been wanting to, so I'd be more than happy to keep pace with anyone choosing this project. Check out the wikipedia article for more.

If suspect orthodoxy isn't your thing, but science and religion is, you might instead choose to read Benedict XVI's homilies on creation and the creation stories in Genesis in the light of modern scientific knowledge. The collection is called In the Beginning. I've finally gotten a hold of it from Hesburgh Library after 2 months, so it's hard to get there, but one of the students has ordered it from amazon.com. I'll bring it to class tomorrow.

3. Novel/film analysis. This one is probably the most nebulous of today's ideas. What I have in mind is you nominating a novel or film you're particularly interested in and reading some secondary material that relates to a theological theme or image in the film.

For example, I like the Matrix movies. In Matrix: Reloaded, there's an interesting ongoing contrast between humans and machines. It's like the movie is involved in asking "What does it mean to be human?" This is a theological question. If I was going to do this for a term project, I would try to either find a theological paper on the movie (not out of the question: search ATLA like I recommended in a previous post) or find some essays on theological anthropology that debated what it meant to be human (especially in relation to artificial intelligence and/or the experience of having a body, both of which I take to be important themes in the movie).

You could also take a movie or novel with a "Christ" figure and compare the depiction of that character with one or several of the christologies we've discussed in class. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, you could talk about Frodo's "great sacrifice" at the end of the novels and discuss how it draws on images of Christ as the high priest (e.g. in Hebrews).

Hit me with your ideas, or post in the comments to share your questions and early concepts with your classmates.