RELS-161, Contemporary Problems in Religion and Culture
Test, 15%,
5 March 1998.
NAME______________________
Student Number_______________
PART I. Identify, indicate the significance, or provide the context for ONE quotation from each of the three texts (two marks each). Circle the number for the question being answered.
1. "Because I am no longer a child I can know your presence though you are not here."
2. "I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. I hate the sealed vault with its cold icon. I hate the staring into the night."
3. "Father, if your suffering is greater than ours, how great that suffering must be.... How great the helplessness. How we dare not abandon the ones who suffer, lest we abandon You.... Teach us to see Love's presence in our abandonment."
4. "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
5. "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him."
6. "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is--He is here hanging on this gallows...."
7. "But I never close my door, never refuse to help somebody who comes to me and asks for something. This I think is my kind of religion."
8. "But if I have believed in ... things that are beyond The Thing ... it is also ... because you are no longer there to be my God, to fill your heart with your abundant and dominating life."
9. "He believed that something is evil both because it hurts somebody and because it violates an imperative, a commandment given us by God...."
PART II. Write a paragraph on this question for four marks.
Joy Kogawa says: "Only appealing to the victim and asking the victim to cry out does not in fact create change. It does require both victims and victimizers to be in dialogue, in communication, in communion, and in recognition mutually of each other's positions." But Elie Wiesel prayed at Auschwitz-Birkenau: "God, merciful God, do not have mercy on murderers of Jewish children.... Do not have mercy on those who created this place. Do not forgive the people who murdered here." Explain the differences between the positions of Kogawa and Wiesel; then suggest what André Trocmé might say.
PART III. Write a short essay for five marks on the changes in the religious faith of each of the three main characters in the books we have studied.
_____________
http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~rels161/resspring98.htm
Maintained by William James
