Individual Presentation
It has been quite interesting to hear what everybody chose to write their final papers on. The range of topics seems quite impressive, and I only hope that mine can stack up. I was not able to present on Friday, so I thought that I would give a general synopsis of my paper here.
My essay is entitled "House of Pain," and in it I delve into the motives and implications behind the implementation of pain and suffering in the two traditions. From the biblical tradition, I drew from the Book of Job and the Gospel of Luke. The parallel that I was able to draw between these two readings, and specifically from the examples of Job repenting and the example of the lost sheep, was that suffering is administered as a means to bring the wandering strays back into the Lord. In essence, it is a form of purification. From the classical tradition I used the stories of Prometheus and Sisyphus. The interesting thing that I found while examining these two examples was the fact that behind the punishments bestowed upon the unlucky recipients were very humanistic motives, in these cases extraction and pure punishment, respectively. I found this to be an interesting dichotomy from the biblical tradition, in that these examples seemingly presented pagan divinities as exhibiting many human-like characteristics.
All in all, I can say with confidence that I hardly scratched the surface of this extremely broad subject, and the implications that I brought into question were quite obvious. I suppose that this is inherent with an essay of this length, but what are you going to do?
My essay is entitled "House of Pain," and in it I delve into the motives and implications behind the implementation of pain and suffering in the two traditions. From the biblical tradition, I drew from the Book of Job and the Gospel of Luke. The parallel that I was able to draw between these two readings, and specifically from the examples of Job repenting and the example of the lost sheep, was that suffering is administered as a means to bring the wandering strays back into the Lord. In essence, it is a form of purification. From the classical tradition I used the stories of Prometheus and Sisyphus. The interesting thing that I found while examining these two examples was the fact that behind the punishments bestowed upon the unlucky recipients were very humanistic motives, in these cases extraction and pure punishment, respectively. I found this to be an interesting dichotomy from the biblical tradition, in that these examples seemingly presented pagan divinities as exhibiting many human-like characteristics.
All in all, I can say with confidence that I hardly scratched the surface of this extremely broad subject, and the implications that I brought into question were quite obvious. I suppose that this is inherent with an essay of this length, but what are you going to do?
posted by Kelby Fischer at 10:14 PM
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