1. Saints and Animals
For this topic, I would start by reading the unit on Saints and their Animals in the UN-Textbook.
I'm especially interested in Saint Francis, and the possibility of retelling the animal stories surrounding his life intrigues me. I read his page on Wikipedia, and it notes that "He...became associated with patronage of animals and the natural environment, and it became customary for Catholic and Anglican churches to hold ceremonies blessing animals on his feast day of 4 October." Saint Francis is a fascinating person in the history of religion, and the connection to nature he and other saints had would be fun to write about! The website section on Saints who Loved Animals could also be a resource for me.
A painting of Saint Francis preaching to animals by an
anonymous Italian painter. Source: Wikimedia
2. Enneagram types and Canterbury Tales
I really enjoy the Canterbury Tales. I read a lot of Chaucer in a medieval literature class last year at OU, and I loved the way he developed characters in his short stories. For this project, I would re-read some of the Canterbury Tales, which I could do in the UN-Textbook unit on these stories. I could mix-in my love for the Enneagram personality framework by re-telling certain tales in a way to bring out the characters' Enneagram types. I would use the Enneagram Institute's website as a resource for the traits exhibited by different number types. Knowing a decent amount already about both the Enneagram and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this would be a creative way to combine two strong interests of mine.
3. Stories from China
As I briefly mentioned in a previous post, I'm interested in studying abroad this summer and have been considering China as a potential location! The rich history and culture of China fascinates me, and I plan on reading the "China" unit in the UN-Textbook during this course. I don't have a firm idea on what this storybook project would look like yet, but I would use these stories as a starting point as well as some of the Chinese stories on Freebookapalooza. I would possibly focus on re-telling tales that have moral applications. The Wikipedia page on Chinese Folklore was interesting to browse and could serve as a valuable resource for this project.
4. Encounters with Christ (Using the Gospel of Mark)
The Gospel of Mark has always been a captivating text for me growing up in a Christian family, and I'm thrilled to re-read it with fresh eyes in the UN-Textbook unit I'm planning on reading for week 4. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus Christ encounters many unique people during his ministry. For this project I would focus on lesser-known stories in Mark and re-tell them from the perspective of minor characters. This creative way of looking at the Christian New Testament would be an enjoyable project for me. In a class I took last year on Judaism, I learned about Midrash--a genre of Rabbinic literature that fills in the gaps of Biblical stories and playfully interacts with Biblical texts in order to deduce moral implications or make interpretative claims. I could write in a somewhat midrashic style for this project, likely using the Wikipedia page on the Gospel of Mark as a resource for important context.
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