HONS: Religion and Literature – Dr. Adam Blincoe
I’ve always heard that every Honors student needs to take a class with Blincoe at least once during their time at Longwood, and I truly learned what an impact that has on you here.
While I didn’t fully understand everything he talked about when it came to the theistic concepts, Blincoe helps you understand things about yourself and the world that you wouldn’t necessarily consider before taking his class, but it also causes you to question everyone and everything in order to find the real truth.
He let us know on the first day of class that our actual topic of the class was called “Theistic Existentialism.” Besides being a major tongue twister every time I talked about the class, it discussed the existence of humans in relation to religion and those who believed in theism, mainly Christianity, as well as counter arguments from a few atheistic existentialists.
I didn’t even know much about existentialism before the class, let alone that there were both theistic and atheistic existentialists arguing a plethora of different topics relating to existence and the problems of evil. We reviewed these arguments through lengthy readings.
One author we looked into was Kierkegaard, which ended up being my favorite by the end of the class. We read many different readings from him, many which involved different characters. This helped differentiate Kierkegaard’s opinion from his writing, so it’s not truly clear what he believes in unless his name is on the whole thing. He writes from versions of living an aesthetic life versus an ethical life, and his own writings show a balance of the two.
My absolute favorite Kierkegaard piece was a parable of geese, because if geese were able to talk, they’d obviously worship God. And if they worshipped God, a large amount of them would waddle to church on Sundays, do their thing during service, then waddle back home and never reap what they sow. This causes these geese, the tame geese, to be plump. They’re not using God’s word to spread their wings and try to fly, they’re staying on the ground and getting eaten. The skinny geese, the gaunt geese, are flying using the Word of God and going out of their comfort zone, which is preventing them from getting eaten.
This parable was mainly written as an attack on the Danish Church, but for some reason made such a connection with me that it’s stuck with me as long as I’ve been in the class. I did ask Blincoe about the third type of goose that often referred to, the silly goose, and what their role is in the parable, but he didn’t seem to have an answer there when I asked him.
It took a lot for me to understand everything I was reading. I usually didn’t, I’d complete my discussion post required for every reading then I’d take notes during the lecture the next class because I knew all my discussion post answers were wrong because I was reading my readings wrong. I couldn’t figure out how to read them right, no matter how many questions I asked about what something meant the next day, so I just tried my absolute hardest then came to class with a very open mind.
My artifact is a dialogue assignment I got to complete with classmates on different concepts applied in a different setting than we had seen in our readings. I had so much fun with my dialogue and the ladies I worked with, as we spent quite a few Zoom calls laughing over ideas and really putting our readings to good use. Blincoe told us to make them interesting, and we definitely did, but we also had a goal to make him laugh out loud. We completed that goal.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l2HJHrUJrP536oW-l8PyYdccZ7_Eg0RnI7l92s_LAew/edit?usp=sharing