Some Essays by Douglas Tennant

Douglas Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII Professor Doris Jakobsh RS 202 – Sikhism: Origin and Development                  Friday March 16, 2012 Critical Analysis of “Folk Practices in Punjab” A critical analysis of the article Folk Practices in Punjab is presented in this essay. Given the assortment of folk practices which I have been exposed to and made aware of from my sleepy little northern Ontario village of 800 souls it is intriguing to read about the much more diverse folk practices elucidated by Bhatti and which are explained as “challeng[ing one’s] urbanized sense and confuses the ethnographic observer regardless of …[their]…nationality, ethnicity, or other acquired positionality” (2004, 139). At first read, the article could be misunderstood as a child like ‘bunnies & lights’ story book. However, after a couple of double takes and drilling down one can appreciate that it is an ...

Introduction to Judaism RS#210 Dr. Menachem Feuer November 30, 2010 By Douglas Tennant The Wandering Jews                         That the Jews are wanderers, and in more ways than one, is indisputable. From the earliest of times Abram, wandered his way from Ur and “settled in Canaan some time between the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE” (Armstrong 11). Moses and the Israelites ‘wandered’ in the desert for 40 years (Good Exodus 16:35) and the great exiles of 587 BCE and 135 CE (Scheindlin 22, 54) were the genesis of legendary diasporic wanderings.  After these significant exiles, other forced mass migrations and various expulsions (151), the evolution of a large segment of the Jews into the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities at least brought them some geographic stability in eastern and western Europe. Even during these way sta...

Introduction to Judaism RS#210 Dr. Menachem Feuer October 19, 2010 Great Things Jewish Come Out of a Crisis: Abraham to Medieval Times             The faith of the Jewish people has survived, indeed thrived at times, for centuries despite being faced by one crisis or another. Be it a pivotal personal crisis based upon obedience to God, societal enslavement, a function of conquest and exile, or the overshadowing effects of new religions the dynamic and resilient nature of Judaism has allowed great things Jewish to be born out of adversity. Selected specific crises will be examined showing how they arose, how the crisis was dealt with and the concomitant ‘great thing Jewish’ that resulted.             That Judaism has had a significant, if not profound and formative impact, on and around the world can almost be a given understanding. But while the...

Douglas Charles Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII, Instructor:  Marybeth White RS 121 – Evil, Question #3.  Saturday November 28, 2009 Liberation Theology in Mott Haven Gustavo Gutierrez says the first act in a theology of liberation is the preferential option for the poor. This means one takes the perspective of the poor seriously in both theory and actions (Module 5, section c4). As one takes the side of the poor, an upward based and  liberating theology will be gathered through shared experiences with them, rather than the traditional dominant and oppressive theology (i.e. Ideology) of acquiescence being shoved down from above (Module 5, section c6, c7). Several people from Jonathan Kozol’s study of Mott Haven will be presented showing that they have chosen to be in community with the poor and struggle against a seemingly overwhelming tide of social evil (Kozol 1995 164). In Amazing Grace, Kozol documents incredible social sin/evil through racial injustice an...

Douglas Tennant        RS 236 Paul: Life and Letters – Book Study Assignment Professor A. Witmer Crossan, John Dominic, and Larry L. Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Discovering and Re-discovering Paul A book, and a fairly lengthy one at that, could be written regarding the books about Paul of Tarsus. Indeed, our course book study list of just the ‘recent’ works about Paul lists 36 titles with almost all of them published since the beginning of the 21 st century. So it seemed at first somewhat overwhelming as to which one to choose to study and be engaged with for this assignment. ‘Ho hum’ came immediately to mind. However, after choosing one by a familiar author there it was, in the first paragraph of their book. “[B]ooks about Paul could fill a library, so why one more on an overworked subject” (ix). The hook was set and I opened my mind to see if Crossan...