All of the work that we have done in this class is practice for completing one final task: revamping a project we’ve already done in another Religious Studies class. For mine, I chose a research paper I wrote for War and Religion in the West. The paper I wrote is linked below, along with the other parts of my project.
The prompt for my paper was as follows:
We have read or will soon read a number of Christian authors (Augustine, Aquinas, Einhard, Charny, Pope Urban II, Joinville) who have commented in different ways upon warfare and the relationship between military activity and Christian religious belief. Discuss the relationship between Christianity and conflict as described in their texts. Is it allowable for Christians to engage in warfare? If so, under which circumstances? How should Christians engaged in war conduct themselves? Can a Christian gain glory through combat? Do any of these authors point to tensions between the roles of a good Christian and an effective soldier? Does engaging in military activity imperil a Christian’s spiritual health/ability to get into heaven? Would it be fair to say that something like a consistent Christian view of warfare existed?
Going into the project, I hypothesized that a consistent view of Christian warfare did not exist. For my methodology, I analyzed each text to determine the authors perspective on warfare looking for any sort of common ground. As my research progressed, I found that it does not seem as if the authors unanimously agree on what Christian warfare looks like, but most texts speak on spiritual duty and self-sacrifice in some way or another.
Full Paper
War and Religion in the West Essay
Video: This Project in 90 seconds
This video was produced using another Adobe product that I have not yet used called Adobe Premiere. My only prior experience with video editing is through iMovie, so there was a lot to learn with Adobe Premiere. In order to make this video, I combined my knowledge of other digital applications with Premiere. I started by making a rough plan of what I wanted my video to look like and decided upon a 90-second explanation of the background of my project. I wanted a visual element in the video without actually being in it, so I designed a series of graphics on Adobe Express. To make these graphics more interesting, I animated parts of the graphic to make the clips more visually appealing. I then recorded myself speaking on the project based on a rough script. I was going to do this on Adobe Audition, but found that what the task at hand required could be done much easier with a simple audio recording application. I then airdropped the audio files to my computer and uploaded them into Adobe Premiere along with the graphics from Express. Then, I edited them together to make the video shown above!
Infographic: Author overview
Due to there being many components of my project that a person who was not a part of the class I wrote this paper for might not be aware of, I decided to use my infographic to provide some background information. I didn’t go far into the details of the authors in my paper because my teacher didn’t feel it was necessary as we spoke about them so much in class, so I wanted to give my audience a face behind the name as well as a reference to the book the author wrote and a small fact. An infographic was the perfect way to go about this because they are meant to display short pieces of information. On this infographic, you can see the new colors I selected for the project as opposed to those on my experimental projects and the theme of this blog. I felt that they were more professional and I will eventually be applying them to every aspect of this project.
Map: Author locations
Seen above is the map that I made relating to information not mentioned in my essay. In the class I took –War and Religion in the West– we spent a lot of class time delving into where each author was from, who they are, and what they stood for. I understand that most people who haven’t taken the course might not know this information. That said, I made a map that displays this information. Click on the pins to see which author is from what place. A picture of the author that matches those on my infographic accompanies each pin in order to better track who is who. While this map doesn’t give a ton of extra information itself, I think it is important to remember where the sources are located. Most of the discussed authors are from France or another European country.
Podcast: More on “the why”
This podcast was made using an application that I’m still getting the hang of called Adobe Audition. Adobe Audition is an audio recording application that can be used in numerous ways. It allows the user to record audio, trim audio, and manipulate the sound of the audio by changing features such as the pitch, background noise, and any other aspect one might think of. For the purpose of this project, I was really only recording and clipping the audio. I decided to use the podcast to describe the why behind my project in my own voice. I feel like podcasts are different from other forms of media because you can hear the actual voice of the author, making the message feel more genuine. That said, I made a quick script based on parts of my short essay, and recorded the basics of the “why” behind the project. I’m in the process of adding opening and closing music, but as mentioned earlier, I’m still learning when it comes to Audition.
Text Analysis
https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=1ee43843529e2eac546614983f6d4973
Given the content of the texts as well as the historical period in which the texts were written, they were not always an easy read. Most were written in Old English, and took quite some time to understand, much less analyze. That said, using a digital tool such as Voyant Tools can be particularly helpful in finding information in such texts without having to read word for word. For example, I was looking for mentions of spiritual duty or sacrifice in the texts. I was able to put St. Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans into Voyant Tools (as seen above) in order to quickly browse the text for keywords that may relate to spiritual duty or sacrifice, thus quickly finding quality evidence for my thesis.