Unit 12 · Capstone: The Sources Speak

In the last unit six students stood at the board and answered one question with six traditions. The capstone reverses that. You choose the question, and the texts do the answering. A researchable question has three features. It is open, meaning it cannot be answered yes or no. It is comparable, meaning more than one tradition has actually spoken to it in its texts. And it is answerable from evidence, meaning you can point to a verse, a teaching or a practice rather than to your own opinion.

Test each feature against a real example. Is war ever right? is open, and nearly every tradition has texts about war, so it is comparable. But it is enormous. A student who asks it will drown in material. Compare it with a narrower version: What do the Torah, the Qur’an and the Dhammapada say about the treatment of an enemy? That question points to three specific texts and one specific issue. It is still open, still comparable, and now answerable in ten pages.

The six starting topics on the board, work, family, forgiveness, the natural world, wealth and war, were chosen because every tradition studied in this course has spoken to each of them. A topic is a subject area. A question is a sentence that ends with a question mark and demands evidence. Wealth is a topic. What does each tradition say a rich person owes to the poor, and why? is a question. Your first job is to move from the one to the other.

One more test matters in a public-school course. The question must be about what traditions teach, not about which one is right. Which religion has the best view of forgiveness? cannot be answered by any text, because the texts do not compete in a contest. How do three traditions explain why a person should forgive? can be answered, and answered well, because each tradition has given its reasons in writing. Keep the question descriptive and the whole project stays on solid ground.

Start with wealth. It is a fine topic and a hopeless question. Ask what about wealth actually puzzles you. Maybe it is this: some people in every tradition are rich, and every tradition seems to say something uneasy about riches. That is a real observation, and it can be turned into a question in stages. Stage one: What do religions say about wealth? Still too big. Stage two: What do traditions say a wealthy person should do with money? Better. Stage three: What do the Hebrew prophets, the Gospels and the Qur’an say a wealthy person owes to the poor, and why? Now you have a question.

Notice what changed at each stage. The word religions became three named traditions. The vague say about became owes to the poor, one specific duty. And the question gained a why, which forces you to look for the reasons a text gives, not just its rule. A rule without its reason tells you little. Deuteronomy commands leaving the forgotten sheaf and the gleanings of the harvest for the stranger, the orphan and the widow, and explains that Israel was once enslaved in Egypt. The Qur’an makes zakat, the required giving of a share of wealth, one of the Five Pillars and ties it to purifying what one keeps. The reasons are where the traditions differ most, and where your paper gets interesting.

Here is the same process on family. Stage one: What do religions teach about family? Stage two: What do traditions teach that children owe to parents? Stage three: How do the Ten Commandments, the Analects and the Guru Granth Sahib describe what a grown child owes to aging parents? The last version is narrow enough to answer because it names an age, a duty and three texts. The Analects speak at length of xiao, often translated as filial piety, the respect and care a child owes to parents. The commandment to honor father and mother sits in Exodus 20. Sikh teaching includes service to family as part of an honest householder’s life.

A warning about narrowing too far. What does the Qur’an say in sura 2, verse 177? is narrow, but it is not a question you can compare across traditions. Stop narrowing when the question names one issue, asks for reasons, and can still be put to three traditions. Write the final version at the top of your notes and check every source you gather against it. If a source does not help answer that exact question, it goes in a separate pile for later, not in the paper.

Three is the number for a reason. One tradition gives you a report, not a comparison. Two invite a contest, this one versus that one. Three make a conversation, in which you can see two traditions agree while a third answers differently, and then ask why. The course has covered the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Sikhism, Jainism, and the oral traditions of West Africa and Native North America. Any three that have addressed your question will work.

Choose for range. If all three of your traditions are Abrahamic, meaning they trace their story through Abraham, as Judaism, Christianity and Islam do, you will find many shared ideas and fewer surprises. Many strong papers pair one Abrahamic tradition with one tradition from India, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism, and one from East Asia or from the oral traditions. On the question of rest, for example, the Sabbath, the Buddhist monastic day and the Daoist idea of wu wei, acting without forcing, give three very different answers to why a person should stop.

Check that each tradition has texts on your question before you commit. Some pairings look promising and turn out thin. A question about a written code of law will find rich material in the Torah, the Qur’an and the Analects, but an Ojibwe oral tradition does not keep its teaching in that form, and forcing it into a law-code comparison would misrepresent it. A question about what humans owe the land runs the other way: Native traditions of the Great Lakes have much to say, and you would be wise to include one, using sources the community itself has chosen to make public.

Size is not the test. Christianity has about 2.4 billion adherents by common estimates and Jainism perhaps four to five million, but a Jain text on nonviolence may answer a question about war more sharply than any larger tradition. Nor should you choose a tradition because you already belong to it or already dislike it. The teacher will ask you to name your three traditions and one text from each before you go further, which is a check that you have looked and not guessed.

Open three tabs. In the first is Psalm 23 in the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation. In the second is a rabbi’s essay on what the psalm meant to shepherds in ancient Judah. In the third is an encyclopedia entry titled Psalms. These are three kinds of source, and the capstone treats them differently. The psalm is a primary source: the text itself, as the tradition preserves it. The essay is a secondary source: a scholar or adherent interpreting the text. The encyclopedia entry is a tertiary source: a summary of what secondary sources generally say.

The rule for the capstone is that every claim about what a tradition teaches rests on at least one primary source, quoted and cited. Secondary sources help you understand the primary text and tell you how adherents read it, and you should use them. Tertiary sources are for orientation only. They can point you to the right chapter of the Qur’an or the right book of the Analects, but they are not evidence, and a paper built on encyclopedia entries will read like one.

Primary sources come in more forms than you might expect. For Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism and Daoism there are written scriptures with chapters and verses. For Jainism there are the Agamas and the writings of later teachers. For the oral traditions of West Africa and Native North America, the primary source may be a story, a song or a ceremony as told by an authorized speaker, and it may exist only in a recording or a transcription the community approved. A transcription of an elder telling a creation story is a primary source; a professor’s book about creation stories is secondary.

Be careful with one common trap. A modern religious leader’s sermon quoting a verse is a secondary source about the verse, even though it is a primary source about that leader’s views. If your question is what the Gospels say about wealth, cite the Gospel. If your question is how twenty-first-century preachers in Chicago read the Gospel on wealth, the sermon becomes your primary source. Which kind of source a document is depends on the question you are asking of it.

This course quotes a specific set of English translations word for word because they are in the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired and anyone may reproduce them. The King James Bible of 1611; the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh of 1917; J. M. Rodwell’s Qur’an of 1861 and E. H. Palmer’s of 1880; Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, fifty volumes published from 1879 to 1910, which include the Dhammapada, the Upanishads and the Daodejing; James Legge’s Analects of 1861; Edwin Arnold’s verse Bhagavad Gita of 1885; and Max Arthur Macauliffe’s six-volume work on the Sikh Gurus of 1909. You may quote any of these exactly.

Each of them is also old, and age has costs. The King James Bible uses thee and thou and words whose meanings have shifted. Rodwell rearranged the Qur’an’s chapters into what he guessed was chronological order, which no Muslim edition does, so his chapter numbers can mislead. Müller and Legge were Victorian scholars who sometimes described the traditions they translated as inferior to Christianity, and those attitudes leak into footnotes and introductions. Arnold turned the Gita into English poetry and added words for the sake of rhythm. Macauliffe was more sympathetic, working closely with Sikh scholars, but his English is formal and his volumes mix translation with retelling.

Modern translations are usually clearer and often more accurate, and you should read them. Most are under copyright, so you may quote only short passages with citation, which is normal academic practice, and you must say whose translation you are using. Better still, read your key verse in two translations, one old and one modern, and note where they differ. A difference between translations is not a problem to hide. It is evidence about the text, and a paragraph explaining it shows a reader that you understand every translation is an interpretation.

For traditions without a single scripture, translation raises a different problem. A Yoruba praise poem for an orisha, or an Ojibwe teaching about the land, was translated by someone, and that someone may have been an outsider with limited understanding. Prefer versions produced by or with the community itself, and say who produced them. When you cannot find a reliable version, say that too. Honest limits are part of good research.

A search engine will return a verse of the Qur’an in a tenth of a second, and it may be wrong. It may be mistranslated, misnumbered, cut short or posted by a group hostile to Islam. The capstone asks you to know where your text came from. Start with the school and public library. Librarians can pull complete printed editions of every scripture in this course, along with scholarly commentaries. The Chicago Public Library and suburban systems such as Skokie’s hold many of them, and the Newberry Library downtown keeps rare early editions that you can request to see.

Online, prefer sites that show their sources. University digital libraries post scanned copies of the Sacred Books of the East and the 1917 JPS Tanakh with page images, so you can check the printed text yourself. Major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum, publish catalog entries for manuscripts and ritual objects with expert descriptions. Religious communities publish their own scriptures: many Sikh gurdwaras link to searchable editions of the Guru Granth Sahib with the page number, called the ang, beside every line. A tradition’s own edition tells you how the community itself presents the text.

Judge a website the way you judge any source: author, audience, purpose. Who made it, and what do they know? For whom, and in what tone? Why does it exist? A site run by a seminary, a university department or a religious body has a clear author and purpose. An anonymous page with no dates and heavy advertising has neither. Be especially careful with sites that quote another tradition’s text only to attack it. A page of Qur’an verses assembled to prove Islam violent, or of Bible verses assembled to prove Christianity absurd, is not a source for what the tradition teaches. It is a source for what its author thinks, and it belongs in a different paper.

Keep a source log from the first day. For each text write the title, the translator, the year, the edition or website, the date you looked at it and the exact location of the passage. If it is a website, save the address and a copy of the page. You will need all of this for your citations, and you will be surprised how quickly you forget where a good quote came from. A log also lets a reader, or a teacher, retrace your steps, which is what makes research verifiable.

The first unit of this course gave you a toolkit: author, audience, purpose. The capstone is where it earns its keep. Take a verse that students often choose for questions about justice, Micah 6:8 in the Hebrew Bible. In the King James translation the prophet says that God has shown what is good: to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly. Before you quote it, run the toolkit. The author, as the tradition presents it, is a prophet named Micah, speaking in the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century BCE. The audience is his own people, whom the surrounding chapters accuse of cheating the poor. The purpose is to correct them: sacrifices without justice, he argues, are not what God wants.

Now the verse means more, and it means something more specific. It is not a general saying about being nice. It is a prophet’s answer to people who thought ritual could replace fairness. A paper that quotes Micah 6:8 and then explains that setting shows the reader that the student understands the text. A paper that quotes it as a free-floating motto does not. The same three questions work on every text in this course. Who speaks in the Gita? Krishna, to Arjuna, on a battlefield, to a warrior who has lost his nerve. Who speaks in the Analects? Usually Confucius, to named students, answering their questions about conduct and government.

Author is the hardest of the three, because traditions and scholars often answer it differently, and you must report both. Jewish and Christian tradition long attributed the Torah to Moses; most academic scholars describe it as compiled from several sources over centuries. Muslims hold that the Qur’an is the word of God revealed to Muhammad; academic study describes its collection into a written text in the decades after his death in 632. Neither of these is your claim to settle. Write both, attribute each, and move on. The rubric rewards accuracy about what people hold, not a verdict.

Purpose is where students most often go wrong, because it requires reading around the verse. A single line can look like a command when it is part of a story, or like a promise when it is part of a warning. Before you copy any quotation into your notes, read at least the whole paragraph or the whole chapter it sits in, and write one sentence about what that larger passage is trying to do. That sentence will end up in your paper, and it is the difference between quoting a text and understanding it.

Two texts about rest. The first is a law: the Sabbath commandment in Exodus 20, counted fourth in Jewish and most Protestant numbering and third by Catholics and Lutherans, which orders a household, including servants, animals and foreigners living among them, to stop work on the seventh day. The second is a verse of teaching: the first line of the Dhammapada, which says that everything we are results from what we have thought. Both bear on a question about work and rest. But one is a commandment, given as binding law to a people, and the other is a verse of teaching, offered to anyone who will consider it. Quoting them as if they were the same kind of sentence would mislead your reader.

Genre is the kind of writing a text is. The first unit listed the main genres in sacred texts: law, story, poetry, prophecy, letter and teaching. Each asks for a different reading. A law tells you what a community was obligated to do, and often why. A story shows a value in action, through characters, without stating a rule. Poetry, like the Psalms or many hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib, expresses feeling and praise, and reading it as law produces nonsense. Prophecy calls a people back to something. A letter, like Paul’s to the Corinthians, answers particular problems in a particular town. Teaching, like the Analects or the Dhammapada, offers wisdom for a student to practice.

The Sabbath law has a reason built in. Exodus grounds it in creation: God rested on the seventh day. The parallel version in Deuteronomy 5 grounds it in memory: you were slaves in Egypt, and now your servants must rest too. That is two reasons from two passages of law, and a careful paper notes both. The Dhammapada’s verse belongs to a different genre and a different logic. It does not order rest. It describes how the mind works, so that a reader will choose to train it. When Maya compares them in her capstone, she must say: one tradition frames rest as commanded, the other frames the quieting of the mind as chosen. Genre is not a detail. It is part of the answer.

In your notes, write the genre next to every quotation: law, story, poem, prophecy, letter, teaching, or, for oral traditions, story, song or ceremony. When you write the paper, name it in the sentence that introduces the quote. In the Torah’s law of the Sabbath, Exodus commands. In a verse of teaching, the Dhammapada observes. In a parable, Jesus tells of. Those small phrases tell your reader you know what kind of text you are holding.

Leviticus 19:18 tells the Israelites not to take vengeance or bear a grudge, but to love their neighbor as themselves. A student could quote that verse and stop. A stronger student asks how the tradition has read it. In Jewish tradition the great teacher Hillel, around the turn of the first century, is remembered as saying that a version of this principle was the whole Torah and the rest was commentary. Rabbi Akiva in the second century called the verse a great principle of the Torah. Christians read the same verse through the Gospels, where Jesus quotes it as the second of the two greatest commandments. Same words, two communities, two readings, and both belong in a paper about what the verse means.

Every tradition in this course has an interpretive tradition, a long conversation about what its texts mean. Jews have the Talmud and the commentaries of Rashi and later rabbis. Christians have church councils, the writings of theologians and, in each denomination, a way of preaching. Muslims have tafsir, the discipline of Qur’an commentary, and the schools of law that draw rules from the text. Hindus have commentaries on the Gita by teachers such as Shankara, who read it as a text about knowledge, and Ramanuja, who read it as a text about devotion. Buddhists have commentaries in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Sikhs have the tradition of katha, spoken exposition of the Guru Granth Sahib in the gurdwara.

For your paper this means one thing: never write the Qur’an says or the Gita teaches and stop there. Add how the tradition has taken it. Many Muslim scholars have read this verse as. Most Hindu teachers in the devotional tradition understand this passage as. When the tradition disagrees with itself, say so; that is not a weakness in your paper but a strength. If Shankara and Ramanuja read the same chapter differently, a reader learns that Hinduism is a family of paths, which is exactly what the Hinduism unit taught.

Where do you find how adherents read a text? In secondary sources written by members and scholars of the tradition, in the introductions to good modern translations, and, with your teacher’s guidance, in a respectful visit or interview. Chicago’s houses of worship have long welcomed students who come to learn rather than to argue. Write down who told you what, and treat a living person’s words with the same care you give a written source. An interview is a source with an author, an audience and a purpose, like any other.

A citation is the address of a passage. It lets a reader open the same text to the same place. Sacred texts have their own addressing systems that are older than page numbers, and using them correctly is a mark of care. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are cited by book, chapter and verse, with a colon between chapter and verse: Micah 6:8, Matthew 5:9. A range uses a dash: Exodus 20:8-11. Then name the translation: Micah 6:8, King James Version, or Micah 6:8, JPS 1917. The Jewish Bible and Christian Bibles number a few verses differently, so check which numbering your edition uses.

The Qur’an is cited by sura, meaning chapter, and ayah, meaning verse: Qur’an 2:177 or, in words, sura 2, verse 177. There are 114 suras, and each has a name as well as a number, such as al-Baqara, The Cow, for sura 2. Because Rodwell rearranged the suras, always cite the standard numbering and note if you are quoting his translation. The Dhammapada is cited by verse, sometimes with the chapter: Dhammapada 5, or Dhammapada, chapter 1, verse 5. The Bhagavad Gita is cited by chapter and verse, 2.47, and note that it sits inside book 6 of the Mahabharata, a fact you need not include in the citation.

The Analects are cited by book and chapter, 15.23 or XV.23, though numbering varies slightly between editions, so name the translator. The Daodejing is cited by chapter, 1 through 81. The Guru Granth Sahib is cited by ang, the page number in the standard 1,430-page edition, and often by the composer, since the scripture gathers hymns of six Gurus and of Hindu and Muslim saints. A citation reads: Guru Granth Sahib, ang 1, Guru Nanak. The Talmud is cited by tractate and folio with a side letter, such as Shabbat 31a. For oral traditions, cite the speaker, the community, the occasion and the recording or publication, and the permission under which it was shared.

Two rules cover every case. First, cite the exact location, not just the book. Second, name the translation or edition every time, because the words you quote are that translator’s words. Build a citation list at the end of your paper that gives the full information for each translation once, and then use the short address in the text. When you paraphrase instead of quoting, cite anyway. The idea still came from the passage, and a reader deserves to check it.

Students lose more time to bad notes than to bad reading. A quotation copied without its citation is useless a week later. A good idea written on a loose page vanishes. The capstone asks for a simple, disciplined note system that you can search. Use index cards, a notebook or a document, but use the same format for every entry. At the top: the tradition and the citation. Below that, three columns or three short sections. First, the text, quoted exactly, with the translator named. Second, the context, meaning genre, speaker, audience and purpose in a sentence or two. Third, the reading, meaning how adherents and scholars have understood the passage, with the name of the secondary source.

Add a fourth line that many students skip: how this passage answers your question. Write it as a sentence, not a phrase. On Maya’s card for Exodus 20:8-10 it might read: The Torah frames rest as a command binding on the whole household, grounded in God’s own rest at creation, so in Jewish tradition rest is an obligation rather than a reward. That one sentence is a draft of a sentence in her paper. Twenty cards like it, and the paper is half written before she opens a blank document.

Tag every card by tradition and by subquestion. If your question is what a wealthy person owes the poor and why, your subquestions might be: who must give, how much, to whom, and for what reason. Tag each card with the subquestions it answers. When you sort by tag, you will see instantly that you have four cards on how much and none on why for one tradition, which tells you exactly what to read next. Gaps found in week one are easy to fill. Gaps found the night before are not.

Keep quotations and your own words visibly separate. Put every quoted phrase in quotation marks on the card, even a phrase of three words, and mark your paraphrases with a P. This protects you from plagiarism, presenting another’s words or ideas as your own, which in this project would most often happen by accident, when a phrase from a commentary slides into your paragraph without a mark. It also protects the text. A sacred text quoted slightly wrong is a text misrepresented, and members of that tradition who read your paper will notice.

The most common error in student papers about religion is a small word: all. All Muslims believe. All Buddhists meditate. All Christians read the Bible literally. Each of these is false, and each is a stereotype, a fixed idea applied to every member of a group. Islam has Sunni and Shia branches and many schools of law and thought within each. Most Buddhists worldwide do not practice sitting meditation daily; it has historically been a monastic discipline. Christians read the Bible in many ways, and the largest church, the Roman Catholic Church, does not teach a literal reading of every passage. A paper with all in it announces that its author has not looked closely.

The fix is precision, not vagueness. Replace all with a qualifier that matches your evidence: many, most, some, traditionally, in this school, according to this text. Then name the branch. Not Jews believe but in Orthodox Jewish practice, or Reform Judaism teaches. Not Buddhists hold but in the Theravada tradition, or in Zen. Not Hindus think but in the devotional path centered on Vishnu, or according to the Upanishads. Each of those phrases is true of a real group and can be checked. Overgeneralization, stretching a claim beyond the evidence that supports it, is what happens when the qualifier is missing.

One text is not the whole tradition, and one adherent is not either. If you interview a Sikh classmate, you have learned what one Sikh thinks, which is valuable and should be reported as exactly that. If you quote one verse from the Qur’an on war, you have one verse, and the Qur’an has others, and Muslim scholars have argued for fourteen centuries about how they fit together. Say so. The Qur’an itself speaks of humanity being made into nations and tribes so they might know one another, a verse many Muslims cite as a charter for diversity, and a student who quotes a verse on fighting without also noting that one has told half a story.

Watch for the historical version of the same mistake. Christianity did not always look like your neighborhood church, and Buddhism in fifth-century India is not Buddhism in Chicago today. Date your claims. The Sabbath command in Exodus is ancient; the rule that a Sabbath elevator stops on every floor is a modern Orthodox practice built from it. Both are Jewish, and both belong in a paper, but they belong with their dates. Precision about who, which branch and when is what turns a report about religion into scholarship about it.

Maya’s first draft of a thesis read: Judaism, Hinduism and Confucianism all value rest. Every word of it is true, and it says almost nothing. A thesis is the central claim of a paper, the one or two sentences the rest of the paper must prove. A weak thesis lists topics. A strong thesis argues. Her revised version reads: Each tradition says a person is owed rest, but each places that duty in a different spot: the Torah in God’s command to the household, the Gita in the balance of a disciplined self, and the Analects in the virtue of a ruler.

The revision works because it has three parts. First, it answers the question for each tradition. Second, it names where each tradition grounds its answer, which is the why. Third, it makes a comparison: the same duty, located in three different places. It is also arguable, meaning a careful reader could disagree and would need evidence to settle the matter. Someone might say the Gita cares less about rest than about duty. Maya’s paper must show, with the text, why balance is the right word.

Notice the phrase would say. The Torah, the Gita and the Analects were written long before anyone worked twenty hours a week at a grocery store. None of them answers Maya’s question directly. So the capstone asks you to reason from what a text does say to what its tradition would likely answer. That reasoning must be visible. Each part of the thesis is a claim, and each claim must point to a passage. If the clause about the Gita cannot be tied to a verse, it must be cut or rewritten.

Three thesis mistakes are common. The ranking thesis says one tradition has the healthiest or most advanced view, which no text can prove and which the course does not ask. The sameness thesis says all religions teach the same thing about rest, which erases the differences adherents care about. The lopsided thesis gives one tradition a full answer and the other two a phrase each. The fix for all three is the same: one clear clause per tradition, one grounding per clause, and one sentence that compares them.

In the Torah’s law, the Sabbath commandment of Exodus 20 tells a household to stop work on the seventh day. That quotation is the first layer of evidence, the text itself. By itself it proves little, because a reader does not yet know what kind of text it is or how anyone has lived by it. A paragraph that drops a quotation and moves on leaves the reader to do the work. The capstone asks you to do that work on the page.

The second layer is context: genre, speaker, audience and setting. Exodus 20 is law, presented as given to Israel at Mount Sinai. It names who must rest: children, servants, animals and the foreigner living among the people. Deuteronomy 5 repeats the command and adds a reason, the memory of slavery in Egypt. The third layer is the reading of the community. The Mishnah, the early rabbinic law code compiled about 200 CE, lists thirty-nine categories of forbidden work, called melakhot. Rabbinic law also holds that saving a life overrides the Sabbath.

The three layers still need a sentence that joins them to the claim. That sentence is the warrant, the reasoning that explains why this evidence supports this claim. Maya writes: Because the commandment lists servants, animals and strangers, and because Deuteronomy ties it to the memory of slavery, the Torah treats rest as something owed to the vulnerable, not only chosen by the free. Without that sentence, a reader sees a verse and a claim sitting side by side, and has to guess how they connect.

Every body paragraph in the capstone can follow the same order. State the claim. Quote the text with its citation. Give the context in a sentence or two. Report how adherents have read it, naming the source. Write the warrant. Five moves, in that order, turn a quotation into an argument. It feels slow at first. By the third tradition it becomes a habit, and a reader can follow every step you took.

On a Friday evening in Skokie, two Jewish families sit down to Sabbath dinner. In the first, an Orthodox family, no one will drive, cook or switch on a light until Saturday night, and in the morning they will walk to synagogue. In the second, a Reform family, candles are lit and the blessing is said over wine and bread. The next morning they drive to temple and spend the afternoon together, but they do not follow the full set of Sabbath rules. Both families are keeping the Sabbath, in the ways their movements teach.

Judaism today has several branches, organized movements with their own teachers and institutions. Orthodox Judaism holds that Jewish law remains binding in full. Conservative Judaism holds that the law is binding but has developed over time. Reform Judaism treats the law as a guide that each generation and each person may interpret. A paper that says Jews rest on the Sabbath by not switching on lights has described one branch and called it the whole. A paper that says many Orthodox Jews do not switch electrical devices on or off on the Sabbath, while Reform Judaism stresses rest and family, has described the tradition.

The same is true everywhere in the course. Hindu teachers have read the Gita in different ways. Shankara read it as a path of knowledge, Ramanuja as a path of devotion, and Gandhi as a guide to selfless action. Confucian thinkers also disagreed. Mencius held that human nature is good and needs nurturing. Xunzi held that it tends toward selfishness and needs shaping by ritual. These are schools of thought, lines of interpretation inside one tradition, and a capstone should name them when they bear on the question.

Disagreement inside a tradition is not a sign that its members are confused or inconsistent. It is what happens when many people, across centuries, take the same texts seriously. Report it the way you report any teaching, with attribution. Write most and many where the evidence supports them, and name who holds the minority view. Do not quietly choose the branch that fits your thesis best and present it as the only one. A reader from that tradition would notice, and so would the rubric.

Maya builds a table before she writes her comparison section. Across the top are her three traditions. Down the side are four rows: who is owed rest, who owes it, how often, and why. In the Torah column she writes: the whole household; the head of the household; every seventh day; God’s command and the memory of Egypt. In the Gita column: the self; the self; daily, in balance; discipline that ends sorrow. In the Analects column: the people; the ruler; by the seasons; a ruler’s virtue. The table makes the pattern visible at a glance.

A comparison shows likeness and difference. A parallel is a point where two traditions answer in a similar way: both the Torah and the Analects place a duty on someone with power over others. A contrast is a point where they differ: the Torah sets a fixed day, while the Analects speak of fitting seasons. Good comparison names both, and then asks why. Here, one answer is that the Torah’s command comes as law to a whole people, while the Analects offer advice to rulers.

Ranking is different. It judges which tradition is better, truer, wiser or more advanced. The capstone does not rank, for two reasons. No text can settle which tradition is right, so a ranking would rest on opinion, not evidence. And a public school studies religion without favoring or opposing any faith. Watch for ranking words: better, higher, more rational, primitive, superstitious. Watch too for hidden ranking, which uses one tradition as the measuring stick. To say the Analects lack a Sabbath is to measure Confucianism by Judaism.

The opposite mistake is just as unfair. To say all three traditions really teach the same thing about rest is not generous. It erases the differences their adherents care about. A Jew who keeps the Sabbath and a Hindu who practices yoga are not doing the same thing, and neither would want the difference hidden. Fair comparison keeps each tradition’s answer in its own terms. It then shows exactly where the answers meet and where they part.

Compare two sentences. God commanded the Israelites to rest on the seventh day. In the Torah, God commands the Israelites to rest on the seventh day. The first states a religious claim as fact. The second reports what a text says. In a public-school paper the second is correct every time, whatever the writer personally believes. Attribution, naming whose belief or text a statement comes from, is the most important habit of respectful language, and it costs only a few words: Muslims hold, according to the Gita, in Sikh teaching.

Use the names traditions use for themselves. Older English books sometimes called Muslims Mohammedans, a term Muslims reject because it suggests they worship Muhammad. The Hebrew Bible is called the Tanakh in Jewish tradition and the Old Testament in Christian tradition. Choose the term that fits your sentence, and know why the names differ. Sikhs regard the Guru Granth Sahib as their living Guru, so the name is always given in full. Many academic writers use BCE and CE for dates because the labels do not assume any faith.

Some words carry a judgment inside them. A loaded word sounds descriptive but ranks or mocks. Cult, when used for a small or new religious group, implies it is dangerous or false. Myth, when used to mean a false story, dismisses a sacred narrative. Primitive calls an oral tradition backward. Idol worship describes Hindu practice from outside and with scorn. A murti is a sacred image in which many Hindus understand the deity to be present. Use that word, with its gloss, instead.

Respect does not mean praise or silence. You may describe hard texts, conflicts and disagreements, including your own reservations if the assignment invites them, as long as you describe them accurately and attribute them. Respect means that a thoughtful member of the tradition could read your sentence and say: yes, that is what we hold, and that is how we would put it. That is the test. Read your draft once more with a member of each tradition in mind before you turn it in.

Every scripture in this course contains passages that trouble some readers. The Gita is spoken on a battlefield, where Krishna urges Arjuna to fight. The Hebrew Bible contains laws of war. The Qur’an contains verses about fighting. Early Christian letters give instructions about slaves and wives that many readers today find hard. A capstone question about war, family or forgiveness will lead you to such passages. The worst choices are to skip them, which misrepresents the text, or to use them as weapons, which misrepresents the tradition.

Treat a difficult text exactly like any other: text, context, reading. Take Qur’an 2:190, which tells believers to fight those who fight them but not to overstep limits. The historical context, as Muslim tradition presents it, is the conflict between the early Muslim community at Medina and its opponents from Mecca. Many Muslim scholars have read the verse as permitting fighting in defense and within limits. Interpretations have varied across fourteen centuries and among legal schools. Your paper can say all of that in four sentences, each attributed.

Readings of the Gita show how much interpretation matters. Some Hindu commentators read the battle as real and teach that a warrior’s duty, his dharma, required him to fight. Gandhi, who practiced nonviolence, read the battlefield as an allegory, a story in which the fighting stands for the inner struggle between right and wrong. Both readings come from within the tradition. A paper on war that quotes Krishna’s command without these readings has told half the story.

Two cautions keep a paper fair. Do not apologize for a tradition by hiding a hard verse, and do not prosecute it by quoting that verse alone. Also keep the text separate from the history. What a scripture says and what some members did in its name are different questions, and each needs its own evidence and dates. Describe violence, persecution and conflict factually, with places and dates, and let the reader weigh them.

The written essay has five parts, in order. The introduction poses the question, explains in a sentence or two why it matters, and ends with the thesis. Next come three body sections, one for each tradition. Each section follows the five moves from earlier in this chapter: claim, text, context, reading and warrant. Then comes a comparison section that sets the three answers side by side. The conclusion states the answer again in fresh words and names what the study could not settle. Last is a works-cited list with full information for every translation and secondary source.

There are two ways to organize a comparison. In block structure, you finish one tradition before starting the next, then compare at the end. It is easier to write, and it keeps each tradition’s answer whole. In point-by-point structure, each section takes one row of the comparison table, such as who is owed rest, and answers it for all three traditions at once. It makes the comparison sharper but can break up each tradition’s voice. Many strong capstones use block structure for the body and point-by-point structure for the comparison section.

The comparison section is where the thesis is proved, and it is the part students most often rush. Walk the reader through each parallel and each contrast. Then give your best explanation for the pattern, grounded in genre and context. Maya might explain that the Torah speaks as law to a people, the Gita as teaching to one person, and the Analects as advice to rulers. So each locates the duty of rest where its own genre points: the community, the self or the state.

The conclusion should name the study’s limits. Maya read the Gita in English, not Sanskrit. She used three passages from traditions with thousands of pages. She interviewed one family from one branch of Judaism. Naming limits does not weaken a paper. It tells the reader exactly how far the evidence reaches, and that is a mark of honest scholarship. End with the question the study opened but could not answer. For Maya, it is how each tradition would speak to a modern worker’s schedule.

A listener cannot flip back a page. That one fact shapes every choice in an oral presentation. State the question and thesis in the first minute and show the thesis on screen. Use signposts, spoken markers that tell listeners where they are, such as: that was the Torah’s answer; now the Gita’s. Give each tradition one key passage, not five. Put the quotation on a slide with the citation and translation beneath it. Then read it aloud slowly, exactly as printed.

Reading a sacred text aloud is a responsibility. Practice every name and term until you can say it without stumbling: Bhagavad Gita, Analects, Guru Granth Sahib, Tanakh. If you are unsure of a pronunciation, ask your teacher or a member of the tradition, not a guess from spelling. Say the translation aloud as well: in the King James translation, or in a paraphrase of chapter 6 of the Gita. Your listeners should always know whose words they are hearing.

Visual aids help when they carry information. A photograph of a Sabbath table, a map of where the Analects were compiled, or a comparison table can all teach. Some images need care. Many Muslims avoid any picture of the Prophet Muhammad, so a presentation should not show one. Physical scriptures also need care. Sikhs keep the Guru Granth Sahib covered on a raised platform, and many Muslims handle a copy of the Qur’an only in a state of ritual cleanliness. A printed excerpt is usually the respectful choice for a classroom.

Do not perform another tradition’s ritual or wear its religious clothing as a costume. You may describe a ritual, show a respectful photograph, or play a recording made and shared by the community. The line is between showing how adherents practice and imitating it for effect. Close the presentation by returning to the thesis in one sentence. Then invite questions, which the next lesson takes up.

Questions after a presentation come in four kinds. A clarifying question asks you to explain something again: what does moderate mean in the Gita passage? A challenge tests your claim: isn’t the Gita really about war, not rest? A personal question asks what you believe. A correction comes from someone who knows the tradition, perhaps a member of it, who says you have something wrong. Each deserves a different answer, and none should make you defensive.

For clarifying questions and challenges, go back to the evidence. Restate the question briefly so everyone hears it. Then answer from the text, its context or how adherents read it. When a classmate asked Maya whether the Gita was about war, she agreed that it is set on a battlefield. She then explained that chapter 6 teaches balance as part of Arjuna’s larger instruction, and that commentators read the setting in different ways. A concession, granting the part of a challenge that is true, makes the rest of an answer more believable.

Personal questions have a simple answer. The assignment asked what each tradition would say, not what you believe. You may choose to share your own view if your teacher allows it. You may also decline politely, as Maya did, and point back to the evidence. Either choice is fine. Do not let a personal answer slip into ranking. You would not want a classmate’s faith, or lack of one, judged by your presentation.

A correction is a gift, even when it stings. Thank the person. If they are a member of the tradition, report what they said as how they, or their community, understand it: that is a helpful reading, and I will check it against my sources. Then check it. Sometimes the correction is right, and your paper improves. Sometimes it reflects one branch among many, and your paper can mention it. When you do not know the answer, say so: I did not find that in my sources.

A rubric is a scoring guide that lists what a piece of work will be judged on and describes each level of quality. The capstone rubric has six criteria, or standards: thesis, evidence and context, diversity and fairness, organization, citation, and delivery. Each has a number of points. Reading the rubric before you write is not gaming the assignment. It is reading the assignment carefully, the same way you read a sacred text with author, audience and purpose in mind.

The weights tell you what matters most. Evidence and context carry the most points because the whole project rests on them. A paper with a brilliant thesis and thin evidence has asserted, not argued. Diversity and fairness come second. That criterion asks whether you named branches and schools, and used qualifiers. It also asks whether you attributed every belief and avoided loaded words. Many students lose points here not through disrespect but through the small word all.

Each criterion has performance levels, often four: exceeds, meets, approaching and beginning. The descriptions make the difference concrete. For evidence, meets might read: quotes a primary text for each tradition, with context. Exceeds might read: quotes a primary text for each tradition, gives its context and reports how adherents have read it, including a disagreement within the tradition. The gap between the two is the third layer of evidence from earlier in this chapter.

Use the rubric twice. Before drafting, turn each criterion into a question for your notes: do I have a primary text for each tradition? a branch named for each? After drafting, score yourself honestly on each line. Then revise the lowest line first. A paper that moves from approaching to meets on evidence gains more than one that polishes its introduction. The rubric is a map of where your next hour of work will do the most good.

Before the final draft, the class trades papers. Peer review is the practice of having a classmate read and comment on a draft before it is graded. Scholars do it before their work is published, and it catches what a writer cannot see in their own pages. Your partner has read the same course and knows the same terms. That makes them the right reader to ask whether your evidence holds and your language is fair.

A good reviewer works through the rubric one criterion at a time rather than reading once and saying it was good. Underline the thesis. Is there a clause for each tradition? For each body section, find the claim, the text, the context, the reading and the warrant, and mark any missing one. Circle every all, every, never and always, and ask whether the evidence supports it. Check two citations by opening the text to the verse cited. Mark any sentence that states a belief without attribution.

Comments should be specific, kind and usable. Good job teaches nothing. This paragraph on the Analects has a quotation but no context helps. So does: you say all Hindus practice yoga, but your source is about one teacher’s reading of chapter 6. Frame suggestions as questions when you can: could you name which branch of Judaism this family belongs to? A reviewer is not grading. The goal is a stronger paper.

Receiving comments takes practice too. Read them all before responding. Sort them into the ones you agree with, the ones you need to check, and the ones you will set aside, with a reason for each. When a reviewer and your sources disagree, the sources win. Then revise. Many teachers ask for a short note with the final draft listing the three most important changes you made and why. Writing it shows you how much the paper grew.

In September 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition, the World’s Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago. It met in a new building on Michigan Avenue that now houses the Art Institute. Speakers from many traditions addressed large audiences. Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from India, began his first speech with the words Sisters and Brothers of America, and the crowd rose to applaud. The Parliament is often called one of the first formal meetings of the world’s religions in the West.

Seventy years later, in Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools may not lead devotional Bible reading. Justice Tom Clark’s opinion added that studying the Bible and religion objectively, as part of a secular education, is consistent with the First Amendment. This course rests on that line. The academic study of religion describes what traditions teach and how people live them. It does not ask anyone to accept or reject them. Students of every faith and of none take the same course on equal terms.

What is the study for? Part of the answer is practical. Americans live among a wide variety of religious communities. A recent national survey found about six in ten Americans identify as Christian, nearly three in ten with no religion, and the rest with other traditions. Chicago’s neighborhoods hold churches, synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras, temples and the Bahá’í House of Worship in nearby Wilmette. A nurse, a teacher, a store manager or a neighbor will meet all of them. Religious literacy, a working knowledge of what traditions teach and practice, makes those meetings better.

Part of the answer is about the skills themselves. You have learned to read a text for its author, audience and purpose, and to quote and cite it exactly. You have learned to report disagreement inside a tradition, to compare without ranking, and to answer a challenge from evidence. Those skills work on a news article, a court opinion or a campaign speech as well as on a psalm. The capstone’s last task is a short reflection: a paragraph on what you now read differently.