Week 7

Wow I can't believe we are already seven weeks into the first semester and half way done! My group's wiki, "Cheese and Rice", was a success! We covered the topic of the apocalypse and analyzed it from four different angles. My wiki was about the apocalypse in Hollywood. I greatly enjoyed learning about how Hollywood has taken the image of the apocalypse and turned it into a million dollar money maker. I found excellent source to be the Journal of Religion and Film. The publications I read were very similar to information I was that trying to claim, and therefore gave my wiki credibility from the scholarly source. I found it interesting that individuals have such varied opinions on the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus (rapture). I learned about the meaning of rapture and different distinctions surrounding apocalyptic texts. I enjoyed the other group presentations and thought everyone did a good job clarifying their topics to an audience with varied religious education and beliefs.
In response to the Marcus Borg reading, chapter 7 and 8, I thought both chapters were interesting and related to our topics in class this week. Chapter 7 is about Jesus' perception of God, and many of the wiki presentations today can be related Jesus' view of God. For example, my topic on the apocalypse is discussed by Borg and he states that "most mainline scholars (including me) don not think that Jesus spoke about his second coming"(Borg 179). Borg also predicted that Jesus did believe in God's final judgement and God perception he will have on humans on the final judgement day (heaven or hell?). Chapter 8 discusses a topic studied at Tuesday's class about the broad and narrow way. Borg says the broad way is the way that people during Jesus' time thought, acted, and behaved. The narrow way comparatively is the "alternative way, the road less traveled... is conceptually simple and easy to state, even as it is existentially challenging" (Borg 218). I thought the last biblical text assignment was an example of the broad way because it mentioned the actions taken by the Pharisees in condemning Jesus for working on the Sabbath. During Jesus' time, working on the Sabbath with not allowed and punishable.
Overall, I thought the wiki presentations went great and chapters seven and eight were very relevant to the topics discussed in this week's class.