New Religious Movement

Main Learning Objective: Apply the five family resemblances of a religion to a fictional NRM Secondary Learning Objectives: Compose a New Religious Movement using creativity Practice clear writing in standard English using paragraphs and proper grammar Have fun! There is no discussion question or essay this week. Instead you will create your own new religion. In this course, I suggested that all religions share some characteristics or “family resemblances”: Some understanding of a transcendent reality; Rituals or ceremonies that connect practitioners to the transcendent; Stories that explain the transcendent, the rituals, and the practitioners’ relation to them; Institutions that structure the participants collective experience of the transcendent and enable it to persist across generations; A set of moral norms or ethical instructions. This week you are reading about New Religious Movements. Your writing assignment is to create your own religious movement. This is an exercise in creativity! Imagine that you are the founder of a new religion. (If you have a hard time coming up with something, image that you are a science fiction writer creating an alternative universe for your characters, and you must come up with some kind of religion for them to practice). You must write a short essay-like letter explaining your new religion to an interested person whom you would like to convert to your religion. The letter must be (must be) between 400-500 words (essays that are 399 words or less will be marked down! essays that are 501 words or more will be marked down!) Your letter must discuss all five elements of religions: it must discuss what vision of the transcendent inspires your religion, it must explain the rituals that you practice, it must summarize the stories or myths that articulate truth as your religion understands it, it must specify what institutions organize and preserve it, and it must lay out some ethical instructions consistent with your religion. Please do not waste any space creating a backstory to explain the relationship between you and the imaginary letter-recipient. We will just assume that it is an interested acquaintance. Feel free to be creative, but please do not see this as an opportunity to be snarky about religion. The point of this exercise is to get you to appreciate in a creative fashion the five shared family resemblances of religions, not to make light of any particular religion or religion in general.