WORK TO BE DONE BY SEPTEMBER 18th

1. Carefully read pages 70-96 and 107-108 in your Hopfe textbook.

2. For one of your week’s posts, do the following and post your answer on your own individual religion blog by September 18. Religions are not dead belief systems, but continue to live and adapt to new and changing situations. One place in which we’re seeing this is in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

1. Go to http://secondlife.com and create an avatar on Second Life. Do this by clicking on the ‘join now’ link on the top right (it’s free) and then following the instructions. You’ll enter some details about yourself and be invited to choose your Second Life (hereafter SL) name. (This is the name by which people in Second Life will know you.) (For those of you who would like to do this on the Dobbs Ferry campus computers, Second Life has been installed in the library computer lab. You may go there to create your avatar and then to enter Second Life. Be patient when Second Life is opening after you sign in. It may take as long as 4 or 5 minutes to load all the software needed on the computer.)
2. After you’ve arrived in SL, orient yourself. Learn how to walk, how to fly, how to interact with others, and how to change the appearance of your avatar) within the world.
3. Then interview 3 other people/avatars that you meet in Second Life about their religious beliefs. (Please make sure that you explain to these people that you are doing this for a class assignment, so they don’t think you’re trying to convert them to some specific religious beliefs.) Do they consider themselves religious or spiritual? Why or why not? If so, in what ways? If not, why not? What do they think about religions other than their own? Post what you learn from the interviews (perhaps with snapshots of you interviewing the other person—easy to do by pressing the snapshot button at the bottom of the SL screen and saving it to a floppy or your hard drive and then loading it into the blog) as your blog entry.

(If you absolutely can’t get onto SL, please email me and explain why and I’ll give you another assignment in its place. But please try to get used to Second Life, since we may use it in a few other assignments in the future.)

3. During the week, write at least one more post on a religion topic of your choosing. This could be comments on the assigned reading or from the introductory class material; a link to an interesting and relevant webpage, video, book review, or article (along with an explanation of why you’ve chosen it); questions that you might have for me or other students in the class; a description of a conversation or experience you have that’s connected with the course content; suggestions for further reading or thinking; etc

4. If you have not already done so, you should read your classmates’ blog entries for this past week and write responses to at least three of the entries, posting them as comments directly below the entry upon which you’re commenting. You can access classmates’ blogs by clicking on the individual blogs listed on the right hand side of this classblog.

And BTW, my Second Life avatar’s name is Ishah Tripsa. If you meet me “in world” (the term for in Second Life) be sure to say hi.