Thursday, March 6, 2014
The "Gospel" of MLK
Let me preface this by stating that I will keep this posting brief. I thought that the exercise professor Silliman had us do, in creating a "gospel" about MLK was greatly enlightening. In theory, we discuss the inaccuracies of the gospels, and how they have impacted our views of Jesus. The fact that miraculous events became supernatural is greatly because of peoples' interpretation of what happened. Having to come up with our own "gospel," though, and comparing between us the stories we came up with, lends a great amount of credence to the argument that the Gospels, while likely rooted in truth, have strayed a good deal from it, and have thus been interpreted erroneously. What were your thoughts on it?
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Putting us in groups, rather than having us work individually, was of major importance, I think, as it presented us not only with a variety of different results from each group, but with competing perspectives even within the same group, which definitely shifted my perspective a little.
ReplyDeleteOn a different note, I think that saying the gospels have "interpreted erroneously" the historical events is not necessarily true - they are not, perhaps, accurate or completely true, and highly distorted by a number of factors (especially the ones we have explored in the exercise), but it feels to me as though the interpretation IS the history, in a sense. As in, the gospels divorced from Jesus have had a massive impact in their own right - sure, an association with Jesus' true message might be erroneous, but the gospels have taken on a life of their own and grown apart from their point of origin (Jesus). Although it lends to a more robust understanding of them, just because the gospels don't get the facts right doesn't make them wrong, it just brings them out of alignment.
I liked the gospel because it forced us to work with the information that we had and to create a narrative that depicts MLK's ideology with inaccurate facts. The inaccuracies made it easier for me to get the beliefs of MLK in the text. I could twist the information in order to reflect exactly what I wanted and how I thought MLK would of preached his beliefs. Overall I believe that the gospel experiment went well.
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