Samuel Williams Blog Reflection for week 3

 Blog Reflection Week 3:

September 8th, 2022

One of the most interesting parts of the Sacred Communications/Sacred Journeys class is all the extremely unique discussions we have during class. There is no other class that I have ever taken that has discussions quite like the ones we have. For this reason, I find this class to be no question the one I look forward to the most. This week, I found many of our class discussions to be extremely interesting, engaging, and overall fun to be a part of. Aside from that, the topics we learn about actually make me think very critically. For example, this week we had discussions surrounding the meanings of I, you, it, he, she, they, and thou. Those sound like very basic words, and they are very basic words, but in the way that we were discussing them, it kept me engaged. It seriously got me to think, comprehend, and understand the material the professor was talking about. Basic words became ideas I actually thought critically about. Along with those, there were other words that I learned about such as Alterity, Cogito, Solipsism, and Liminal. When I first heard those words, I had absolutely no idea what they meant. After a long, interesting conversation, I was able to understand their meaning and origin. It's also not just extremely unique words we learn about, but Dr Redick has the most fascinating stories about his experiences. While interesting, they are also very funny and quite relatable. However, in my opinion, the most interesting thing I learned about was a Liminal. A liminal is a boundary between two different places. They can be a boundary between everything from two different rooms to a boundary between a regular place and a sacred place. What got me to understand the concept was when Dr Redick compared it to a scene in a Jim Carrey movie. The movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, also featuring Kate Winslet, has a scene that is a perfect representation of what a liminal is. In the scene, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have an extremely important moment in the hallway of the Jim Carrey characters apartment building. The hallway was an example of a liminal as it was the boundary between the Kate Winslet character's place and the Jim Carrey character's place. With this example, I was able to understand the concept of the liminal. This was just one example of the discussions we have in class, but there are many more that are just as interesting.