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Dublin Core
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Title
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Virgen del Carmen
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virgen-del-carmen
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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I will participate in the 2021 Summer Residency
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Fernando Alvear, 36, PhD Candidate in Philosophy and Graduate Instructor, University of Missouri
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July 16, 2013
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A religious festivity in Chile
Description
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In the middle of the Atacama desert there’s a small village called La Tirana, with a regular population of around 1,200 inhabitants. The village has a few streets, some modest houses made of sun-dried bricks and tin roofs, a cemetery, and a small church. What’s interesting about this place is that each 16th of July, its population increases up to over 500,000 people, who gather in the biggest religious festivity in Chile, called “Fiesta de la Tirana.”
Eight years ago, while still living in Chile (my home country), I was invited to join one of these organized groups, called bailes, who visit this village as their annual pilgrimage. The bailes are composed by people from many different places, encompassing not only the north of Chile but also some of Bolivia and Perú. Its members usually come from challenged socioeconomic segments of the population. Their colorful dances and upbeat music have different origins: some dance moves are inspired by Inca’s worship of the sun and the Aymara’s veneration of the Pachamama. Some of their outfits incorporate elements of the clothes of old servants, miners, and enslaved peoples. The music that the bailes dance is a fusion between indigenous rhythms, African beats, Spanish music, and even classical music. During one week, the village is flooded with music, dance, and color.
The main goal of the bailes is to dance in front of the sacred image of the Virgen del Carmen, patron saint of Chile. The dance represents the bailes’s unique way to connect to the divinity. Believers ask God for protection and health, express their gratitude and devotion, and promise to come back, thus continuing the tradition.
As an outsider, it’s easy to see this practice merely as another case of religious syncretism. Given that the dances do not follow the strict guidelines of the roman rituals of the Catholic church, the practice has not always been accepted, and some have even claimed that it dangerously borders with idolatry. None of this matters to the people of the bailes, of course, who manage to keep alive a tradition that connects their inner spirituality with the divinity, through their community and culture.
What impressed me in my visit was the way the people of the bailes connect their everyday life with the pilgrimage, the dance, and their faith. Everyone has a reason to dance: some to give thanks for their newborn, some to pray for their projects and plans, some to make sense of the grief of the loss of a family member, others to request a better future for their loved ones. This led me to wonder about my own reasons for being there. Was I there to study them? Was I there as a tourist, to take pictures and to post them on social media? Beyond the lights of the spectacle, I learned that authentic religious experience is inseparable from authentic human experience. The more we learn about divinity, the more we learn about our own transcendence and significance. The closer we get to our reality, the closer we get to unravel the mystery of divinity.
The bailes’s faith and devotion showed me a deep sense of identity and authenticity, hard to find in our globalized culture. Far from alienating, religious faith seems to be for them a way of life that preserves their identity and culture, allowing spirituality and corporality to express each other on every dance move. I can only hope to live with that deep sense of reverence and respect to my culture as they do.
Title
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La Fiesta de La Tirana: Integrating Spirituality, Corporality, and Tradition
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la-fiesta-de-la-tirana
Chile
Cultural Identity
Dance
Faith
Pilgrimages
Religious Festivals
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Stained Glass Spiral
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Pixabay
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stained-glass-spiral
Text
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E-mail
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John Cleary, 60, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Description
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I was a high school english teacher in a suburban high school, and I am currently teaching philosophy at a community college in New Jersey. At various moments throughout my career I have encountered students who resist discussions about faith and religious experience. The reason for this, I have observed, is the role of religious indoctrination in their family life and the powerful influence of their religious institutions. While I have never discounted the importance of faith and religious experience as being important and relevant to help one with identity formation and the interpretation of suffering in the world, some students who are defensive about their faith were unable to see the value of discussing the nature of religious experience. In this respect, their faith often prevented them from understanding what religious devotion is and how to talk about it openly.
The role of the humanities involves asking difficult questions about religion, and it is unfortunate that religious fundamentalism across the spectrum of different faiths often undermines a students' ability to think deeply about the origins of their motivating influences. For this reason, it is even more critical that we support the humanities to encourage students to think beyond their narrow influences, and to understand that questioning religious belief does not mean abandoning it.
Title
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Quo Vadis: Religious Experience and Critical Thinking
Identifier
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quo-vadis-religious-experience-critical-thinking
Faith
Family
Religion
Religious Studies
Self-Realization
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Salvation Mountain
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salvation-mountain
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Graduate Student Residents 2020
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graduate-student-summer-residents-2020
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National Humanities Center Summer 2020 Graduate Student Residency
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Victoria Machado, 30, PhD Candidate in Religion & Nature / Writing Instructor at the University of Florida
Date
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2010
Description
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It was the middle of nowhere—nothing but sand, the occasional old car or rusted out piece of machinery, a strange lake known as the Salton Sea, and in the distance a rising mound of color that glimmered in the desert sun. In 2010, with encouragement from my religion professor, my mother and I quite literally drove across the country, roughly 2600 miles to Salvation Mountain, a mound of colorful paint that displayed biblical and religious messages. Bible verses accompanied images of bluebirds, flowers and waterfalls, all molded out of a mixture of clay and straw. This visit proved well worth the journey as it helped me to jump into ethnographic fieldwork while also allowing me to experience my first prominent ‘humanities moment.’
Rising 50 feet high and spanning 150 feet wide, the Dr. Seuss-like whimsical creation was made entirely by hand and proved to be as unique as its creator, Leonard Knight, an elderly man who dedicated his life to building this mountain in an effort to proclaim God’s love. Leonard was as kind hearted and gentle spirited as I had imagined. He lived at the mountain staying primarily in an old shaded hammock. A couple people who would check on Leonard over the years explained that he spent his days scavenging the dump for old building materials that he could use to add to his mountain. Along the way, he would often pick up something to eat. Salvaging car doors, windows, ladders, and buckets, Leonard incorporated anything he could find into his masterpiece. Over time, he built it up—adding new sections like a makeshift trophy room that contained local plaques he received or the ‘yellow brick road’ that consisted of a painted yellow stairway to the top.
Showing us around, Leonard emphasized the reason for building the mountain: he wanted to tell the whole world that God is Love. He explained, “people got too complicated with love. Just keep it simple.” While his mountain displayed bible verses like the Lord’s Prayer and proclamations like “Jesus loves you,” perhaps above all Salvation Mountain acted as a direct representation of one man’s personal faith and larger understanding of the world around him. The mountain embodied a lived religion that ventured beyond static scriptures into the dry heat and sun-worn desert landscape of California.
As an undergraduate, I understood religion within a sociological lens. It could help organize groups, driving and inspiring a range of outlooks and perspectives. But it was also magical, evoking a sense of wonder and awe. Like other humanities, religion helps us to explore and think critically about the human experience while deeply tugging at our emotions. Talking with Leonard a man who lived off the grid in a hammock in the desert, he whole-heartedly believed in the power of love and set out to embody such a love through the best way he could: a large colorful mountain. Of the handful of visitors I met that day, Leonard was the only person who had any strong ties to religion. Though his proclamation seemed apart from the views of those who stumbled upon the creation and an anomaly in a seemingly ‘middle of nowhere’ location, Salvation Mountain reveals the rich life and prevalence of religious thought that exists in marginalized places.
While faith is normally looked at in the grandeur of cathedrals, churches, mosques, and temples, or even the beauty and solace of redwood forests, canyon lands, and ocean horizons, Salvation Mountain’s appearance on the margins of town and society show that even in the most unlikely of places, religion can drive conversation, thought, and action. It reveals the complexity and power that religion can have, even when its just one person calling out in the desolate desert.
Title
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A Mountain of Faith
Identifier
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mountain-of-faith
Architecture
Art
Bible
Cultural Awareness
Faith
Religion
Religious Studies
Sociology
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The Jesus Movement
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Graduate Student Summer Residents 2019
Description
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The National Humanities Center's graduate student summer residency program, <a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-welcomes-graduate-student-summer-residents/">“Objects and Places in an Inquiry-Based Classroom: Teaching, Learning, and Research in the Humanities”</a> took place July 15–26, 2019. Representing 28 universities in 18 states, these participants worked with leading scholars and educators from across the United States as they learned how to add value to their research by focusing on teaching and learning.
Text
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Washington, DC
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Azizou Atte-oudeyi, 50 years, PhD Student at Rice University, Department of Religion
Date
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August 2016
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The Cross of Jesus Christ
Description
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My humanities moment came with my conversion from Islam to Christianity. It opened a wide world for me and enabled me to see that my new faith was distinct, but shared some of its humanistic values which we find in religious traditions around the world. I began to see areas of difference and convergence with my African roots, my former religious community, Islam and decided that I will do graduate work in the human sciences. <br /><br />Ideas communicate the vision and often inspire people in ways that one did not expect. One of those ideas was the slogan of Rice University that talked about “unconventional wisdom,” which in the Department of Religion at Rice University invites a robust conversation about religions around the world. The quest for unconventional wisdom suit my goals, and the School of Humanities offers several opportunities for critical interdisciplinary research that will prepare me as a scholar of global Christianity in a multi-religion world. Christianity is rooted in Judaism and first developed as a Mediterranean religion which later spread to Africa, Europe, and rapidly became a world religion. <br /><br />I find studying religion within a global context meaningful because the Christian tradition’s emphasis on the humanity of Jesus humanizes religion. What Jesus did was to work with the community around him. Indeed, scholars describe his followers and their humanistic message as the Jesus movement which started within the Jewish community, but by the time of Jesus death, it had grown to a multi-ethnic humanistic program centered beliefs about God. This movement later developed into what is known as Christianity around 40 AD when the so-called pagans or gentiles coined this name in Antioch, nowadays Turkey. <br /><br />Christianity remains for me a humanistic journey and studying the humanities today will prepare me to research some of the issues people around the world face. For me, specifically, it means that I should strive to understand the relation between Christianity and economic development. The economy is not merely a dismal science because it is a necessary component of human development and well being. Studying in the school of humanities will strengthen my research as I examine what faith communities have done and what they can do for individuals and humanity as a whole, not only they are targets of conversion, but because the Christian tradition follows in the footsteps of Jesus who taught his followers to care about other human beings. <br /><br />However, I am in no denial of the negative role that religion played and continues to play in human relations with destructive wars, all forms of violence, and its corollary of human subjugation. But it is worthy to notice that studying the human dimensions of the movement, demonstrates that Christianity is indeed a humanistic journey. For me, religion in general is part of our humanity, and Christianity gives those who follow its path an opportunity to prioritize the human so that people can build a humane world. This is what humanities as a scholarly pursuit means to me.
Title
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What About the Jesus Movement?
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Jesus-movement
Christianity
Faith
Islam
Religious Conversion
Religious Studies