Religion in the News

The intent behind this assignment is to encourage you to adopt a practice of being critical and self-conscious about religion.
Steps:
1) Find an appropriate news story that deals with any subject matter that touches on religion.- The story in question needs to present some assertions or claims about some kind of religious data.
The news source can be from a newspaper, an online news source, a TV news story, etc.
 The news source need not be especially lengthy, though it should contain enough material for you to engage with.
 Finally, the news story does not need to be from the immediate present — older stories are just fine.
2) Read the story carefully and take notes on it, paying particular attention to such things as:
 what specific religious tradition or traditions are covered in the piece;
 what factual claims are made or assumed about those religious traditions;
 whether those factual claims might be over-generalized (e.g., “all Christians believe in purgatory”) or impossible to verify (e.g., “religious feeling is especially intense among Hindus”)?
 whether any specific religious roles or offices are mentioned, or if the people involved are all laity;
 what attitudes are taken to or implied about the individual beliefs, practices, traditions, and religious offices and actors mentioned in the piece;
 what implicit ideas there are about unity or division in the tradition(s) under consideration;
 what implicit definition or understanding of religion seems to be operating — what kinds of things are deemed religious in the story, and on what basis? (note the importance here of the word “implicit” — it is very unlikely that your story will actually offer a definition of religion; instead, you must tease out, from what is assumed in the piece to be religious [or not], what kind of definition is being taken for granted);
 whether the facts described as religious by the article fit better into what we would identify as a basic, exchange-oriented form of religion or more reflect the religion of literate intellectuals;
 what attitudes toward religion are implicit in the article: is religious implied to be good or bad, interesting or boring, important or irrelevant? how are these attitudes conveyed?
LAYOUT
 The assignment should consist of a title page and content, as follows:
 The first paragraph of your paper should simply introduce the news story and give a fairly even-handed paraphrase of its content.
 The next paragraph should draw out the article’s assumptions about what religion is, how it’s defined, and how it works — including the form or mode of religion at issue (i.e., basic or intellectualizing).
 The third paragraph should draw out the author’s implicit assessment of religion: do they think religion is good or bad? What practices or beliefs do they approve of, and which do they disapprove of?
 The fourth paragraph should consist of a statement of your opinion of the assumptions in the news story: do you think their (implicit) definition, evaluation, etc. of religion is correct?
 The last paragraph should draw general conclusions from your analysis about the treatment of religion in the media.
 The paper may be organized around a central thesis or argument. If it is, the thesis should be stated explicitly in the last line of the introductory paragraph. You may, however, instead organize the paper more as a report, providing information and analysis, but not necessarily a single argument.
 The paper must have a title page, as described below.
 The paper should restrict itself to the news story in question, the textbook, and material covered in class. Information from the textbook must be cited, including page numbers (parenthetically as “(Bond, 87)” or the like); information derived from lectures should not be cited. Anything quoted directly must be enclosed in
quotation marks and its source given, even if it’s from one of the lectures. No bibliography is required if you stick to these sources. External sources should absolutely not be used for the analysis in the paper. If you wish to consult external sources to confirm the accuracy of factual information in the news story (which in general is not necessary, and which I would discourage), then you must accurately cite the source and page number of any information you derive from such sources, and you must include a bibliography at the end of the paper with full bibliographic information on all sources used. Again, I want to stress, this should not be necessary — stick to the textbook and the lecture materials, and you should be fine
Format:
 All pages must be numbered at the top right, and double-spaced. The title page is not to be numbered, and does not count as page 1.
 The paper must use a 12-point font throughout. The choice of which font to use is up to you, although Times New Roman is generally professional-looking.
 The first line of each paragraph should be indented. There should not be an extra line between paragraphs.
 The paper will be graded according to the criteria on the grading rubric, below.
 You should use a relatively formal style, and avoid contractions. You may, however, use the first-person (“I”) if you wish to.