choosing research topic
REL4910
Kenneth Udut
21-JAN-26
Hello Professor Knight. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I’d like my
paper to be about, and I thought about the various strange loops of my
interests. A central topic I seem to return to repeatedly in life is time; not so
much “time as a coordinator” like train schedules, but rather our
relationships to time.
Religion as belief, faith, ideology or social stratification mechanism never
drew me as much as the idea that religion changes how we inhabit time.
Religion can create a space in time where categories past and present
dissolve into an eternal present paradox. A religious ceremony that operates
on cycles stitches the space-time continuum together in such a way that
they are all but a single event; a higher dimensional experience expressed in
our lower dimension, only seemingly spread across lifetimes. In mythology,
the origin event is key and it creates a dividing line between the
undifferentiated before or the times of chaos vs what is now. Prophecy does
the same but for the future and yet in different ways.
This is but a few thoughts of what I think might work for an appropriate
paper. I guess my strange loop circles around the phenomenology of time or
perhaps psychology of time, as it’s a lived experience – a living relationship
like breath to air; embodied activities that can also become timeless and
expressed in both similar and very different ways across different religions.
Each seem worth exploring, comparing and contrasting and allowing to stand
on their own right in their own spaces.
Religions reconfigure our relationships to time