Dear students,
Please answer any two questions here under this thread. Please use the textbook as much as possible in your answers since I will be grading your contributions with your use of the textbook in mind.
Please respond to each other’s answers. If possible, provide examples from your personal experience.
- Briefly describe several ways in which the emergence of urbanization affected community life.
- Describe the crisis that the loss of primal collective life brought about.
- Explain why you would find it hard to study and understand primal religions and some religious traditions today if you only looked at them from an exclusively monotheistic point of view.
- Explain how diversity relativizes all stories.
- What were the questions that led to the emergence of the great world religions?
- Highlight how postmodernity differs from modernity, according to this text.
- Explain the significance and meaning behind a typical ritual such as a Passover seder.
- Explain how myth and ritual bind individuals.
- Explain how a religion can be called a religion if it does not have a belief in God.
- Discuss the significance of story to all religions.
- Discuss how indigenous peoples viewed their identity.
- Discuss the implications of the terms primitive, tribal, and indigenous.
- Why did a well-known scholar of comparative religions call our species Homo religiosus?
- Discuss the concerns that the Venus figurines most likely represented and how those matters could affect the group.
- List and briefly discuss the three main uses of totems in indigenous societies.
- List and briefly discuss three common characteristics of shamans around the world.
- Discuss the significance of the ending of the nationwide Ghost Dance movement in 1890.
- Explain how shamans still remain critical figures in leading their societies in facing the crisis of modernity.
- Discuss the meaning of White shamans.
- Discuss some features of the principle of axis mundi.
