Main Learning Objective: Analyze a religious text through careful reading

Secondary Learning Objectives:

Practice critical and reflective reading using a religions text from Judaism
Explain the role an etiology plays in a specific religious tradition
Understand the relation between a sacred story and a ritual in a specific religious tradition
Exodus 12-13 is an etiology, a story the explains the origin of a rite or religious practice or ceremony. By now you should be familiar with the importance of rites and ceremonies in a religion. This topic was discussed in Week 1. It is also the subject of a reading this week: the story of the Passover.

NOTES:
The 3 Major monotheistic religions:
1. Judiasm
2. Christianity
3. Islam

Judiasim and ABRAHAM
PHYSICAL ANCESTOR
ELECTION
COVENANT
OBEDIENT TO GOD’S LAW

They do not only share certain ideas of god but, historical heritage as well. All 3 of them trace their heritage to the figure of Abraham.

In all 3, Abraham is the locus of identity, the mirror in which all 3 see themselves. Argued to centuries who is the offspring.

Judiasm and Abraham// Physical Ancestor:
According to NA, Abrahams; great grandsons are each Progenitors of the 12 tribes of Israel. It goes from Abraham to his youngest son Isaac to Isaac’s younger son Jacob. (Abraham,Isaac and Jacob to Jacob’s 12 sons and those 12 sons become the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel and he embodies God’s special choice of the Jewish people that is election and he also signifies the special relationship that god has with the jewish people that is the covenant).

Covenant: Does Abraham embody election and covenant but he also has it further significance this idea is only hinted at in the bible but in jewish tradition and jewish literature outside of the Bible Abraham is often presented as the Model of obedience to God the one who follows God’s revealed will his Torah centuries before that Torah was given in it’s fuller

According to these 3 religions there is only one person who deserves to be called God and the distinction btwn.

NOTES:
Introductory Comments

Centrality of the Earth (Sacred Space)
Circularity of History (Sacred Time)

– It’s important that we realize that native American religions and still being practised today, they’re not a relic of the past, they’re not something that’s died out, they’re not something from a by gone era.

Native American religions are diverse

– When Columbus landed on the islands there were hundreds of different tribal groups and ethnicities spread across the American continents.
– Have their own distinct cultures, languages, religious traditions that were peculiar to them.
– Certain themes and aspects of their religious thinking:
1. Sacred space
2. Sacred time

Well known American-Indian activist vine Deloria asserts as the fundamental point of contrast between christian dominance and European understanding of religion and Native American understandings of religion.

Centrality of the Earth Sacred Space:

– The earth plays an important role in a variety of religious traditions across the americas. The earth for native americas is a living spirit (Native American museum visit) you’ll see when you walk in an atrium with several banners hanging and the first one says “living earth”. For native Americans the earth is not a sacred place, source of life. It is a spiritual entity, It has a personality. Native Americans refer to the earth in female terms as “mother” and “ giver of life”.
– In the bible, the land plays a very important role, when the bible talks about the land, it’s almost referring to what we would call Palestine and second it treats the land not as a living entity but as a gift. In no sense is the land a spiritual entity.
– Christian Europe it’s not viewed as a gift but as a resource. This indicates a contrast of how the europeans and the native Americans view the land. (Major source of conflict)
– When Columbus landed on the carribean islands, have a royal notary drawing up a deed claiming the lands for the Spanish crown (in latin).
– Natives: pzrovidesthe stuff of life and they respond with respect, thanksgiving
– When these lands are appropriated by federal government or private commercials, the Native American groups who had lived on this lands can’t just leave and perform their same sacred rites or even their agriculture practices somewhere else. This is because those practices, those ceremonies and the land on which they are performed has an ireevocable connection . These specific placed=s and the tribes that live on them exist in a harmonious reciprocal balance, in an equilibrium. iF ONE OF THESE ELEMTNS IS REMOVED, THE BALANCE IS DESTROYED AND THAT’S WHY. THESE PRACTISEC CAN’T BE CARRIED on at some more “convenient place”

– These other aspects of creation, the birds, the fish, the animals, the trees, these themselves like the earth beings with a spiritual nature, they’re not simply biological species or potential property. They are part of an interconnected web.

2. THE EARTH AS A COMMUNITY
– Among Native American people there’s a recognition of some kind of spiritual consciousness that is extended to every aspect of cremation even things that Western Europeans would consider inanimate the streams and the rices and the waterfalls.
– The land is inhabited by this whole spectrum, this range of animal and plant life. This aspect of Native American religion comes out very clearly in our readings.
– THANKSGIVING HYM: native Americans call the earth mother, the foodstuff’s in the grains that come from the earth are referred to as “sisters”. The sun is a brother and the moon is a grandmother. This language of kinship of family being extended to all of creation and it draws into one vibrant spiritual Nexus all living things and the earth on which they dwell.
– Th task of Native American religions is to still in humanity and the tribal communities and the respect and the self discipline necessary for those communities to have a vibrant, harmonious relationship with all of creation and with all the spiritual beings within it.

Pochahantas where the main character sings about the spiritual life of all aspects of creation. That song does capture very well this aspect of Native American spirituality. The community of animals,people, spirits and the natural physical landscape, the energy running through all of these things and binding them together is a major theme and all of these elements exist in a single pattern or recurring cycles.

SECOND MAIN FOCUS: Corcularity of the history sacred time
– Myth: a powerful way that a society articulates what it believes to be ultimate reality and in the west
– While christianity was dominant there was this powerful understanding, this belief that god was bringing all of the cosmos to its culminating point in his kingdom in a final universal aspect of. So from creation to the events of sacred history up until the ultimate termination God was directing history with the goal in mind.
– The idea of history is going somewhere keeps popping up again and again in the west and it has deep roots in the western modes of thinking.
– The is a major point of kind of contact between the indigenous religions of the americas and those of Africa. We see the same emphasis of history as a process as a series of patterns that recur again and again. Its not like an arrow going from point A to B, it’s more like a wheel that is constantly turning around a fixed centre.
– The goal of indigenous religions in the americas is to orient societies and adapt these societies to this unchanging pattern so that the human culture will exist in a harmonious relationship with the world around.
– Human beings interact with time not by controlling their environment or directing time towards certain goals or manipulating history so that it fits a timetable or a work schedule. Rather, it is the task of the human culture the human community to observe the cycles of nature, to connect to them through ritual practices, to be rejuvenated in a sense of rebirth through the sharing of these energies.