Second Paper Assignment (for Thursday April 4, 2002)
Your second short paper in this class will be due on Thursday April 4, 2002. The paper should be three to four pages in length and should deal with the following theme:
The paper will be based on readings assigned for class on Thursday April 4. These include:
Chadwick pp. 54-79
Lane and MacMullen 14.1-15.2 (pp. 164-201)
You are not required to do research outside of these readings for this assignment and you are not required to use footnotes in your paper. You are expected to have read the sources and to use them in your paper (with the name of the source and relevant page numbers in brackets). If you quote from the source directly (even if it is just a phrase) put this quotation in quotation marks and cite the source in brackets.
E.g.: Beard, North and Price tell us “Roman temples were not independent centers of power,” yet one can find exceptions to this principle (Beard, North and Price p. 87).
I encourage you to define your own terms for your paper and to organize it according to your own concerns. You should, however, generally focus on the following three problems:
What charges were brought against Christian by the polytheist majority in the empire and why were these charges made?
How did the Christian minority defend itself from these charges (focus especially on Athenagoras = LM 15.1)?
How might this ancient tradition of “religious apology” influence our own understanding of religious tolerance? Pick one religion (your own religion or another contemporary religion) and describe how you might adapt Athenagoras’ arguments to defend that religion in the face of detractors and persecutors.
Though I hate to have to bring it up, plagiarism is an important issue which has come to plague university campuses with the advent of the internet. Plagiarize is defined by Webster’s as:
“to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own; use (a created production) without crediting the source.”
If you use any source apart from the texts listed above to construct your paper, you must cite it in a bibliography. If you quote anything longer than a clause from that source, you must put it in quotation marks and cite source and page number in a footnote. If you are caught plagiarizing even so much as a sentence from another source, you will automatically fail the class.