Mahn
WR20: Negotiating Religious Pluralism
Major Writing Project 2
An Intertextual Essay about Monotheistic Identity and Dialogue
Key Dates:
 Proposal (RR5) due: Wednesday 11/1 in class
 Monday-Wednesday, 11/6-11/8. Small groups meet and respond to each student’s first
draft. First draft of your essay should be posted to Blackboard>Communications>Group
Pages no later than 24 hours before your small group meets. This will allow your group
to read and respond to your draft before the small group meeting.
 No regular class on Monday, 11/6. (Your small group meeting is your class period)
 Final draft due Monday, November 13, in class. Please include a provocative title, a
short abstract, acknowledgements, page numbers, and documentation using Turabian
footnotes, as is customary in the academic study of religion. Please submit this final draft
with all previous drafts, pre-writing, outlines, etc, including the two letters that you
received from members of your small group. Please also post a second copy to
Blackboard.
Assignment
Compose an essay in which you use at least one text on supersessionism or monotheistic relations (Beck,
Sacks, Sanders, Peters, Willimon, Esposito, Soulen, Wyschogrod, or others) to comment upon at least one
cultural, political, or popular text (that is, a non-academic text—one that doesn’t try to make an academic
argument), and vice versa. In doing so, please show how theories of the Jewish, Christian, Muslim
identity and relations between them help elucidate related popular text(s), and how the popular text(s)
might also serves to illuminate, question, extend, and revise the academic or theoretical accounts. Feel
free to use your ethnographic notes from the Freeman Center, Muslim Friday (Jumah) prayer, or other
religious scripts as additional “texts.” By working between academic and popular texts (including coming
to terms with, forwarding, countering, and taking the approach of these texts), compose a clear and
compelling project about religious identity and Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations. Ideally, your academic
texts will allow you to see, interpret, and judge the popular text in a way that you otherwise couldn’t,
while the popular text will allow you to reconsider or reassess theories about supersessionism,
monotheistic relations, and religious dialogue. One additional suggestion: Write this essay for someone
who is not necessarily familiar with these academic texts or with the importance of popular texts for the
academic study of religion. You will therefore need to answer the “so what?” question in your essay.
Why are you claiming this? Why does it matter? For whom does it matter?
Please note that an intertextual essay differs from a “compare and contrast” paper in two ways. First, an
intertextual essay interprets works in light of or through other works. It wants to show how reading
“between” texts can clarify or complicate certain themes, questions, tensions, ironies, and presuppositions
in a way that working with only one text cannot. A “compare and contrast” paper is less sophisticated
than this—it usually just lists differences and similarities of the two texts without actively using these to
open up new insights or tensions. Second, a compare and contrast paper usually takes one of two forms.
Either the author first summarizes one text, then the other, and then compares them even-handedly, or the
author compares and contrasts a new theme in each paragraph of the paper. These forms might help
structure your intertextual essay, but you need not be confined by them. Often times, a project such as
this will first highlight relevant aspects of academic portrayals of Jewish-Christian relations, for example,
the deep problem of supersessionism, and then analyze the popular text in light of the aspects that have
been highlighted. The end of the project might return to the academic accounts, revising some of its
claims in light of what you’ve learned from the popular text.