Year 8 Blog

You’ve started doing me a project on an aspect of religion that interests you. You may already have some information, but if not, please have a look at the links below and hopefully you’ll find something useful for your project.

• Religious Art: BBC Muslim Art, Wikipedia Islamic Art, Islamic calligraphy, Christian Art, or ask Mr Bigg to see “The Christ We Share”, which includes many different pictures of Jesus; Understanding Christianity 3, pp. 22-3. Make sure you look at a variety of religious art so you can do analysis.
• Ghosts and Life after death: BBC article; Ghost Village; New Steps in RE Book 3, Chapter 7; Discovery, Chapter 4; People and Their God, Chapter 8. Make sure you consider several points of view so you can do analysis.
• Religious War: See what you can find out about the Crusades using Google, or perhaps look at Muslim Fundamentalism. Perhaps ask Mr Bedford, as this is quite historical.
• Hindu Gods: There are lots of books in the classroom, or you could start by looking here. The main question to analyse is how there can be only one God, yet many Gods at the same time…
• Vietnamese Buddhism: Here’s a start. The thing to analyse is how Vietnamese Buddhism is different from other forms of Buddhism.
• Does God exist?: There are various ways to approach this one. See what you can find out about the argument from design (that the world is too complex to have happened by chance therefore there must be a designer (God), or look at the argument from experience that refers to people’s experience of God as proof God exists. Try here for a general introduction. Make sure you look at a view arguments and try to explore their strengths and weaknesses in your analysis.
• Christian Worship and Churches: There are loads of books that will help you out on this one, or try here, or have a look at La Sagrada Familia, one of the most famous modern Cathedrals. To do analysis here you need to think about how the design of a church reflects Christian beliefs. For really good analysis you could think about how different kinds of churches show different Christian beliefs…
• Religious Footballers: Here is a good start. See what else you can find on Google. To do good analysis on this you need to look at how the players’ religious faith affects their life and football.
• Stuff about Jesus: Come and see me on this one to be clear on what exactly you want to look at.
• Judaism: I know you’ve already done some fantastic work on this! What I’d love to see now is some writing to accompany it that shows some analysis. A key celebration each year is the Passover (or Pesach), and you could look at how this feast remembers the story of the Jews leaving Egypt. I’ll find you some books on this…
• The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: Your first job is to find out about the Four Noble Truths and explain what they are. Next, perhaps you could analyse how they relate to other Buddhist ideas, or what these ideas mean for real Buddhists?