Proposal to solve a problem

The title of the essay that I read was The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong.  The author is Bill McKibben. In the essay, McKibben talks about how most our supposedly “christian nation” knows nothing of the religion and beliefs within that religion. He gives examples and statistics to support this.

I came up with the problem that I wish to address because of how McKibben talks about america not being into christianity as a bad thing. While I believe that people should have a general knowledge (at least) of all religions, just to not be ignorant, I do not necessarily believe that a deep knowledge of Christianity should be expected of americans. People should not be expected to know about Christianity just because that was the belief of our forefathers. I understand and agree that it was important in the development of our country and I believe that we should observe these beliefs. America, though, is all about freedom. People should be free to believe what they want and should not be expected to know everything about a religion that they do not care about or believe in. We must be careful not to be ignorant about these things. 

My solution is not completely developed as of yet. In a perfect world, my solution would be to require a religions class in high school. Part of that solution would be that it is taught in a purely informational way, not in a persuasive or biased way. I think the information and history of the religions should just be laid out and students would be able to take from it what they wanted. In the world we live in today, some teacher or some student would ruin it by being biased.

Re-seeing and Reshaping.

I think I will focus more on what students can do for themselves in order to not be lost on the first day of classes. The problem I addressed will be different because I’m choosing to focus on what the students can do instead of the faculty of Ball State. Basically what I want to do with the essay is to turn it around to where I give suggestions about what incoming students can do to prepare themselves to successfully navigate Ball State’s campus. In the original essay, I focused on things that Ball State could do but I now realize that the things I suggested would not be as effective as I had once thought. I will remove suggestions to Ball State and add helpful suggestions on how to be prepared for the first day of classes.