LA-dventures!

Our religion class just ended with a bang (14 page paper) and we are now moving into our final LA Term class. Writing the paper was my favorite part of Urban Religious Movements because we had to be connected with the community we were studying and wrote our paper on, and I had such a great experience working with the Messianic Jewish community I studied. The level of scholarship in the congregation was impressive and I had so many great conversations with so many of the members that it was a pleasure to go and learn about their religion from their perspective.

It was also interesting to see how their perspective informed my faith and my view of Christianity and Judaism. Mainline evangelicalism tends to be thousand miles wide and about an inch deep so encountering the richness and depth in the intellectual approach and historical tradition of the Messianic Jewish faith was refreshing.

I also had a friend in town a few weekends ago which was so fun. We went all over the place and squeezed as much LA as we could into one weekend.

My internship has moved into serious grant writing and I'm in the middle of consolidating a letter of intent which will be our stock letter to send to all potential donors. We'll see how far I get before the amount of things I don't know about grant writing or the organization get in the way, but that's what I'm attempting to do.

And this past Monday we went back to APU briefly to watch a screening of MissRepresentation, a documentary about womens' representation in the media which was very thought provoking and definitely worth watching.

Next week we start Urban Systems off right with another paper due, and then we're off to Mexico for the weekend to study immigration. I'm looking forward to learning about the immigration system and border issues where they're taking place, and getting a new stamp in my passport.