Assignment 3 of 3

Course 2, Assignment 3 of 3

The Transfer: Finding a Scope in the Wild

What You Are About To Do

This is the final assignment in Course 2. You have already done two things. In the first assignment you performed the sorting move on a claim about Christianity you had inherited, separating faith from packaging from residue. In the second you explained what you learned to a friend, in your own voice, in the form a real conversation would take. Both of those assignments kept you inside the Christian tradition. This one does not.

In this assignment you will take the sorting move the book uses across all five of its chapters, and you will apply it somewhere else. Somewhere the author of The Scope did not take it. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. You will find a tradition or practice in the wild where essence, packaging, and residue are all present and confused for each other, you will walk through it using the diagnostic questions this sheet provides, and you will produce a paper, a video, and a challenge response on what you found.

There is a reason this assignment comes at the end of the course. A student who can do it is a student in whom the sorting muscle has been installed, not just demonstrated. Performing the move once, on Christianity, with the book's help, is one thing. Performing it on something the book never touched, in a domain the book never entered, using only the shape of the reasoning, is the proof that the shape has entered you.

If you completed Course 1, you have done a transfer assignment once before. Course 1 Assignment 3 asked you to find a self-referencing analytical model in the wild, a Wellhausen, and walk through its failure. That was a different move applied to different material. The form of this assignment is the same. You are again taking an analytical move out of its home domain and running it somewhere unfamiliar. The move is different. The test is the same.

Your Reading

Before you begin this assignment, return to Chapters 1 and 2 of The Scope. Read them again with a specific question you did not have the first time you read it. What is the shape of what the author is doing to the doctrine of the immortal soul? Not the content. The shape. Strip out the Christian specifics and notice the structural move the chapters are performing.

Here is the shape, stated plainly so you know what you are looking for when you re-read. A tradition is looked at. The tradition has something it is actually organized around, a real essence that practitioners across eras and regions share. The tradition also has local forms and flourishes, packagings that vary by region, era, or school but that are legitimate expressions of the essence. And the tradition, over time, has collected material that does not come from the essence or from any proper packaging of it. This material came from somewhere else. It was adopted for reasons the tradition has mostly forgotten. It has been treated as essential for so long that practitioners can no longer tell it apart from the essence. The book's move is to do the sort. It names the essence. It names the packaging. It names the residue. It shows where the residue came from. Once you see the sort clearly, the tradition looks different. You can still love it. You can see it better.

That is the shape. A tradition that has mistaken residue from elsewhere for its own essence, and mistaken legitimate packaging for universal requirement, is a tradition that cannot see itself. The sort makes it visible to itself.

You will find this shape in many places outside of Christianity once you know what to look for. The rest of this assignment shows you how.

What This Assignment Is For

The book's whole argument is that the sorting move it teaches is general. The move is not a trick that only works on Christianity. It is a mode of careful thinking that is useful anywhere human beings belong to traditions and cannot tell what is essential about the tradition from what is merely how the tradition is currently dressed. If the book is right about that, then a student who finishes the course should be able to use the move outside Christianity. If the book is wrong about that, the move is a parlor trick and the course was a waste of your time.

This assignment is the test of whether the book was right.

It is also, and this is not a small thing, the most fun assignment in the course. You are going to spend a week or two noticing confused traditions in your daily life. In the food you eat. In the hobbies you practice. In the professional field you work in. In the subculture you belong to. Most of them will be hiding in plain sight and will look completely different to you once you can see them. This is not a chore. It is a tool you are going to keep for the rest of your life, and the field you are about to walk into is enormous and genuinely entertaining.

The Pattern Named

The pattern you are looking for has three parts, plus a diagnostic.

First, there is essence. The actual thing the tradition or practice is organized around. What practitioners across eras, regions, and schools share when they are doing the thing well. The irreducible core. If you remove the essence, the practice stops being the practice.

Second, there is packaging. The legitimate variations. Regional styles. Period traditions. School-specific techniques. These are not the essence but they are not foreign either. They are how the essence has been expressed in particular places and times. A tradition has many packagings, and the packagings are often the most visible and cherished parts of the tradition's identity, which is why people confuse them for the essence.

Third, there is residue. Material that came from outside the tradition, or from a specific commercial or cultural moment, that got attached to the tradition and then got defended as essential to it. Residue has at least three typical origins. It can come from a different tradition that got borrowed from and whose foreign origin has been forgotten. It can come from commercial pressure that produced a standardized simulation of the tradition and then sold it back as authentic. It can come from a particular cultural moment whose assumptions have been baked in so deep that practitioners mistake them for the nature of the thing.

The diagnostic that confirms you have found the pattern: when you name the essence, the packaging, and the residue separately, the tradition looks different. Practitioners can argue about packaging and think they are arguing about essence. Residue can be defended with more passion than the essence, because the residue is often the part that has been most recently threatened. And the honest form of the tradition, without the residue and with packaging held lightly, becomes visible in a way it was not before.

That is the pattern. An essence that is actually shared, packagings that are real and varied, and residue that has been hiding inside the tradition's own self-image.

What This Is Not

Before you go looking for examples, you need to rule out three things that look like the pattern but are not.

The first is ordinary commercial knockoff. A store-brand product that imitates a name-brand one is not a tradition with residue. It is imitation. The pattern requires a real tradition with real practitioners, not a product and a copy.

The second is ordinary generational drift. A practice that used to be done one way and is now done another way is not necessarily carrying residue. It might just be evolving. The pattern requires that something foreign has been attached, not just that the practice has changed over time.

The third, and the most important exclusion for this assignment, is tribal politics.

The political topics of the moment all contain traditions with essence, packaging, and residue, probably. Abortion debates, gun culture, immigration discourse, election politics, climate discourse, pandemic politics, racial discourse, whatever the current fight happens to be. This is not the course where you write about them. The reason is not that the topics do not matter. The reason is that the tribal reflex attached to them will swallow the sorting move you are supposed to be practicing, and the paper will become about the politics instead of about the structure.

If you write this paper about a political topic, your instructor will not read it as a sorting of a tradition into essence, packaging, and residue. Your instructor will read it as a political argument dressed as an analysis, because that is what it will end up being, whether you intend it or not. The tribal reflex is strong in all of us and no one is the exception, you included. Avoid the topic entirely and the reflex cannot hijack the paper.

The fourth exclusion is religion. Any religion. Your own or somebody else's. The course has already taught you the move on Christianity. This assignment is about whether the move transfers out. Picking another religious example, even a non-Christian one, does not test the transfer. Find something secular.

The field of non-political, non-religious examples is enormous. You will not run out.

Three Worked Examples

The rest of this section walks through three examples in detail so you can see the pattern three times before you go hunting. All three have the same structural shape. None of them is political or religious. Read all three. The repetition is on purpose. By the third one you will have the pattern.

Example 1: Italian Food

When an American says "Italian food," they usually mean a specific thing. Spaghetti with meatballs. Chicken parmigiana. Baked ziti. Garlic bread. Red sauce. Maybe a Caesar salad to start. A red-and-white checkered tablecloth in the background. A bottle of Chianti in a straw basket.

An Italian from Italy, shown this menu, would recognize almost none of it as Italian.

Walk this through the three parts of the pattern.

The essence of Italian food, what Italian cooks across every region of Italy and across centuries actually share, is simple. Good ingredients treated with respect. Technique that brings out what the ingredient already has rather than covering it. Regional specificity based on what grows locally. Restraint in seasoning. Pasta, bread, olive oil, cheese, vegetables, wine, and a cuisine built around their combination. The essence is technique and ingredient philosophy, not any specific dish.

The packaging is real and enormous. Tuscan cuisine is not Sicilian cuisine is not Piedmontese cuisine is not Roman cuisine is not Neapolitan cuisine. Within each region there are further distinctions by town, by family, by grandmother. Carbonara in Rome is not carbonara in Milan and is not carbonara in the house where your friend's mother learned to make it. These are real variations, all legitimate, all expressing the essence of Italian cooking in the particular place and time they come from. None of them is "wrong." Each of them is Italian.

The residue is where it gets interesting.

Chicken parmigiana is not Italian. It is Italian-American, invented in the United States, probably in New York or New Jersey, in the first half of the twentieth century, by Italian immigrants who had access to more meat than they had in Italy and to Americans who wanted larger portions than Italians would have served. The dish does not appear in Italian cuisine proper. A visitor asking for it at a restaurant in Rome will get a polite and slightly bemused response.

Spaghetti with meatballs is the same story. Pasta and meatballs are both Italian. They are not served together in Italy. The combination was an American invention, born of the same immigrant moment, and then sold back to Americans as quintessentially Italian.

Heavy marinara drenching every dish is American. Italian pasta is dressed, not drowned. Garlic bread as a pre-meal staple is American. Italians do not typically eat toasted garlic bread before dinner. Caesar salad is Mexican, invented in Tijuana by an Italian-American restaurateur named Caesar Cardini, and has no Italian origin. The red-and-white checkered tablecloth aesthetic is American diner design filtered back through Italian-American restaurants in the mid-twentieth century.

And here is the deeper layer of residue. The tomato itself, without which most of what Americans and even most Italians would recognize as "Italian food" would not exist, is a New World plant. Tomatoes were brought from the Americas to Europe after 1492. They did not enter Italian cooking in any serious way until the eighteenth century. The tomato-based pasta sauce that the entire American imagination of Italian food is built on is fewer than three hundred years old in Italy itself. Italian cooking before tomatoes was a different cuisine. The tomato is, to Italian food, a very successful piece of packaging that has been present long enough to be mistaken for essence. For most purposes it can be treated as essential. If you asked whether tomato sauce is "really" Italian, the honest answer is "yes, for the past few centuries, but the tradition is older than the tomato."

Now notice what the sort reveals. An American arguing with another American about whether chicken parmigiana is "real Italian" is arguing over residue. Neither of them has touched the essence. An American who insists the red-checkered-tablecloth restaurant serves authentic Italian food is defending packaging that was invented in New Jersey, not Italy. And an Italian snob who insists the tomato is an impostor in Italian cuisine is technically correct and practically wrong, because some packagings, held long enough and well enough, become indistinguishable from essence.

That is the pattern. An essence actually shared across Italian cooks, packaging that varies legitimately by region and family, and residue from American commercial development that has been defended as Italian for so long that most Americans, and some Italians, cannot tell it apart from the real thing.

Example 2: Jazz

Jazz is the cleanest version of the pattern for musically inclined students, and the most contested, which is part of why it works so well.

The essence of jazz, what every jazz musician across every era and style is actually doing when they are doing jazz, is improvisation over harmonic structure, with swing feel, in a tradition that grew out of African-American musical forms in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Call and response. Blue notes. Rhythmic displacement. The musician is composing in real time over chord changes that the other musicians are also navigating. The essence is a practice, not a sound. Musicians who are doing this are playing jazz.

The packaging is enormous and contested. Dixieland is packaging. Swing is packaging. Bebop is packaging. Cool jazz is packaging. Hard bop is packaging. Modal jazz is packaging. Free jazz is packaging. Fusion is packaging. Latin jazz is packaging. Each of these is a legitimate expression of the essence in a particular era and scene. A bebop player and a free jazz player are both playing jazz. They are playing different packagings. Fights between advocates of different packagings (bebop loyalists dismissing fusion, traditional jazz audiences booing Ornette Coleman) are fights about packaging, not essence, even though the participants in the fights believe they are fighting about essence.

The residue is where it gets interesting.

"Smooth jazz," as a category, is mostly residue. The category was largely created by a radio programming consultant in the 1980s, aiming at a specific demographic's work-day listening habits, and was built to be inoffensive background music. Most of what plays on smooth jazz radio has more in common with soft rock or easy listening than with the jazz tradition. Some smooth jazz artists can actually play jazz. Most of the music on the format is not doing the thing the essence of jazz requires, which is improvisation of real substance over harmonic structure. It has been shaped to be functionally background. Background music cannot be improvised in any serious way, because the listener is not listening. The category, presented as a subgenre of jazz, is mostly a commercial product wearing jazz's name.

"Jazz brunch" as a concept is residue. The pairing of jazz with upscale dining arose in the mid-twentieth century as a way for hotels and restaurants to provide live music at a price point that assumed the musicians were taking a working gig rather than a performance. Actual jazz in the tradition of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane was not written to be background for people eating eggs benedict. The musicians playing jazz brunches are often very good and are doing their job, but the frame in which jazz appears as dining accompaniment is residue from the hospitality industry, not from the tradition.

The gentlemen-in-suits, hushed concert hall, well-behaved-audience aesthetic that some listeners associate with jazz is residue from the European classical concert tradition grafted onto a music that was born in clubs and dance halls. Early jazz was dance music. Audiences were loud. Musicians responded to each other and to the crowd. The silent reverential concert was imported from a different musical culture and applied to jazz after it had become "respectable" enough for institutions to book it. This is not entirely bad. It is not the essence.

Now notice what the sort reveals. Jazz traditionalists who dismiss fusion are defending packaging against packaging. Smooth jazz advocates who argue their music is continuous with Coltrane are defending residue as essence. The endless argument about "what is jazz really" is usually an argument about which packaging counts and how much residue the disputant has absorbed without noticing.

That is the pattern. An essence (improvisation, harmonic structure, swing feel, the tradition of the music) that is genuinely shared across the art form. Packagings that vary legitimately by era and style and region. Residue from commercial radio programming, hospitality pairings, and concert hall conventions that has been mistaken for the essence.

Example 3: Agile Software Development

This one is the most fun for students who work in or near technology, and the cleanest version of the pattern in a professional domain.

In 2001, a group of software developers met in Snowbird, Utah, and wrote a document called the Agile Manifesto. The document is four sentences long in its core form, plus twelve supporting principles. The essence it names is simple. Working software delivered frequently. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan. The thesis was that large software projects had been failing because they tried to specify everything up front and follow the specification, and that a better approach was to iterate quickly, get feedback, and adapt. The essence is learning by doing, delivering often, and changing the plan when the plan turns out to be wrong.

The packaging arrived almost immediately and has never stopped arriving. Scrum is packaging. Extreme Programming is packaging. Kanban is packaging. Lean is packaging, borrowed from manufacturing. SAFe is packaging aimed at large enterprises. LeSS is packaging aimed at different large enterprises. Each of these is a specific framework for organizing teams, meetings, artifacts, and roles in service of the essence. Scrum has sprints, standups, retrospectives, a product owner, a scrum master, story points, velocity, backlogs. Kanban has boards, work-in-progress limits, flow metrics. Each framework is a legitimate attempt to package the essence for a particular kind of team and a particular kind of work.

The residue, and the word "residue" is almost too polite here, is enormous.

The agile-coaching industry is mostly residue. A large consulting sector has grown up around certifying practitioners in specific frameworks and then selling their services back to companies wanting to "become agile." The certifications themselves are almost entirely residue, since the essence of agile cannot be certified by attending a two-day course. The frameworks sold by these consultants are often bloated descendants of their originals, with layers of ceremony, terminology, and tooling that have no connection to the original manifesto.

Jira-as-theater is residue. The ticket-tracking tool has become, in many organizations, the thing that teams serve, rather than a tool that serves teams. Tickets get written. Tickets get estimated. Tickets get moved across a board. The metrics extracted from Jira become the measure of the team's "agile maturity." None of this has any necessary connection to delivering working software frequently. It has become a theater of agile, performed in Jira, while the essence is often elsewhere or absent.

The ceremony stack is largely residue. Scrum's original meetings made sense in Scrum's original form. Over two decades, organizations have added ceremonies. Daily standups. Sprint planning. Sprint reviews. Retrospectives. Backlog grooming. Estimation sessions. Pre-planning. Release planning. PI planning at enterprise scale. Each ceremony was originally tied to a specific feedback loop. Many of them have been kept long after the feedback loop they served has been forgotten. Teams now spend significant portions of their week in ceremonies whose purpose they cannot articulate.

The role of "scrum master" has become residue in many organizations. In Scrum's original form, the scrum master was a servant-leader role, temporary, focused on removing impediments and coaching the team toward self-organization. In many companies the role has become a permanent manager of ceremony, responsible for running meetings, maintaining Jira, and reporting metrics. The original purpose has been replaced by the residue.

And the signature piece of residue, the thing that would be funniest if it were not so common: the Agile Manifesto explicitly said "individuals and interactions over processes and tools." The vast bulk of what is sold as agile today is processes and tools. The manifesto's founders have, in various public statements, said that the thing sold under the name agile today is largely not what they had in mind. The essence has been buried under its own packaging, and the packaging has been buried under commercial residue, and the whole stack is now defended as "agile" by people who have never read the manifesto and do not know they are mostly running something else.

Now notice what the sort reveals. A software team arguing about whether to use Scrum or Kanban is arguing about packaging. A team being "coached" by an external consultant toward a more expensive certification is often being sold residue. A team that keeps all the ceremonies and none of the fast feedback is performing the packaging without receiving the essence. And the honest form of the thing, a small team iterating quickly, talking to its users, adapting its plan when reality contradicts the plan, looks very different from what most companies call agile today.

That is the pattern. An essence, small and specific and powerful, that was genuinely new in 2001. Packagings that are real attempts to express it at different scales. Residue from consulting, tooling, ceremony expansion, and commercial certification that has covered the essence so thoroughly that many practitioners cannot find it under the stack.

The Five Diagnostic Questions

You have now seen the pattern three times. Here is the tool you will use on your own example. Five questions. Answer them in order, in your paper, and you will have walked the diagnostic.

1. What is the tradition or practice? Name it concretely. Not "food" or "music" or "business." A specific tradition with specific practitioners and a specific history. Italian food. Jazz. Agile software development. Woodworking in the Shaker tradition. Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Amateur radio. Whatever it is, name it so a reader who does not know it could look it up.

2. What is the essence of the thing? What do practitioners across eras, regions, and schools actually share when they are doing it well? This is the hardest question and you should take your time with it. If you cannot name the essence in a few sentences, you have not yet seen the tradition clearly. Keep working until you can. The essence is what would still be recognizable as the tradition if all the packaging were stripped away.

3. What are the legitimate packagings? Name several. Regional variations. Period styles. Schools or lineages. These are real and they are not residue. They are how the essence shows up in specific places and times. Being able to name packagings cleanly, and to say what makes each of them legitimate expressions of the essence, is evidence you understand the difference between packaging and residue.

4. What is the residue? Where did it come from? This is the signature question. Name specific items of residue. For each one, trace its origin. Commercial pressure. Borrowing from another tradition whose origin has been forgotten. Cultural moment whose assumptions have been baked in. Do not just say "there is residue." Name it. Show where it came from. If you cannot trace the origin of your supposed residue, the item might be legitimate packaging you have failed to recognize, or it might be residue whose origin you have not yet figured out. Either way, keep working.

5. What becomes visible about the tradition when you hold the three categories separately? Sketch briefly what the tradition looks like when the essence, the packaging, and the residue are held apart in your mind. What are practitioners arguing about that is actually arguments about packaging? What is being defended as essential that is actually residue? What has been lost or hidden that becomes findable again? You do not need to resolve the tradition. You need to show that the sort clarified something about it.

Choosing Your Own Example

Here is the rule that matters most. Your example must have all three parts of the pattern, clearly named and traced. An essence you can articulate. Legitimate packagings you can identify and distinguish from residue. Residue whose origin you can trace. If any of the three is missing or fuzzy, you have not yet found your example. Find another one or work harder on this one.

Off-limits for this paper: examples whose primary force is political. Abortion debates, gun culture, immigration discourse, election politics, climate discourse, pandemic politics, racial discourse, any example where the main thing you want to say is that one political side is dishonest and the other is honest. These topics may contain traditions with essence, packaging, and residue, but the tribal reflex attached to them will swallow the sorting move and the paper will become about the politics instead of about the structure. Pick something where nothing in you is defending a side.

Also off-limits: religious examples of any kind. The course has already taught you the move on Christianity. This assignment is about whether the move transfers out. Picking another religious example, Christian or otherwise, does not test the transfer.

Also off-limits: examples where you are the angry insider. If you are personally furious at what has happened to a tradition you love, you might not be the right person to write about it this semester. The anger will show up in the paper and will read as grievance rather than as analysis. You can come back to it later when your relationship to the material has cooled. Pick something you care about but are not currently at war with.

Good hunting grounds: cuisines, music genres, martial arts, sports cultures, craft disciplines, professional methodologies, academic subfields, subcultures and scenes, family or ethnic traditions, regional cultures, hobby communities, fashion movements, design schools, dance traditions, theater traditions, beer and wine cultures, tea and coffee cultures, language-learning methodologies, fitness subcultures, outdoor-recreation traditions, tabletop gaming communities, historical reenactment, amateur science communities, any domain where people belong to a tradition and argue about what the tradition "really" is.

One sanity check before you start writing: if you removed the specific details of your example and described it purely structurally, would the structural move still be interesting? If the interest of your example is entirely in the specific grievance or the specific insider knowledge rather than in the structural move, pick again. You are not writing an insider's defense of a tradition. You are writing a structural analysis that happens to use a specific example to show how the move works outside Christianity.

What You Will Produce

The Paper

A written paper of approximately one thousand to twelve hundred words, in three parts.

Part 1: The Tradition Named. Introduce the tradition or practice you chose. Describe it concretely enough that a reader who does not know anything about it can follow what you are about to analyze. Do not assume your reader knows what Shaker furniture is, or what bebop is, or how Brazilian jiu-jitsu is organized. Set up the tradition in language someone who has never heard of it would follow. Roughly one quarter of the paper.

Part 2: The Five Questions Walked. Walk through the five diagnostic questions on your example, in order, in your own voice. This is the bulk of the paper. Roughly one half. Each question gets a real answer, not a token answer. Questions two and four are the ones your instructor will read most closely. If you cannot name the essence cleanly, and if you cannot distinguish residue from packaging with specific origin tracing, you have not done the sort.

Part 3: The Connection Back. In a few paragraphs, connect your example back to the work the book does, particularly in Chapters 1 and 2. Name, in your own words, why this is structurally the same move the author is making with the doctrine of the immortal soul. You are not recapitulating Chapter 2. You are showing that you see the shape, in your example and in the book, and that you understand why it is the same shape in both places. Roughly one quarter of the paper.

The Video

A recorded video of ten minutes, plus or minus two. You present the substance of your paper on camera, in your own voice, looking into the camera. You may use brief notes. You may not read from a script.

The video is not a summary of the paper. It is you explaining your example, out loud, to a person who has not read your paper. Think of it as explaining the pattern and your example to a curious friend who asked what you are studying. Ten minutes is enough time to lay out the tradition, walk the diagnostic, and land the connection to the book. It is not enough time to ramble. Prepare.

Your face must be visible throughout. The recording quality does not need to be professional but must be clear enough that your instructor can see you and hear you. Phone, webcam, tablet, all are acceptable.

The Challenge Response

After your instructor has reviewed your paper and your video, you will receive three challenge questions. At least one of them will press on whether the thing you identified as residue is really residue or whether it is legitimate packaging you have failed to recognize. Another will likely ask you to apply the diagnostic to a second tradition the instructor names, on the spot, to see whether you can run the move on unfamiliar material. The third will probe a specific place in your paper or video where your reasoning was thin.

You respond to all three questions in a second recorded video, between three and six minutes total. Same format as the first: on camera, notes permitted, no script.

How This Will Be Evaluated

This assignment is graded pass / does not yet pass. The evaluation looks at the paper, the video, and the challenge response together, as a single body of work, against five dimensions.

Dimension 1: Evidence you read the book. Specific engagement with Chapters 1 and 2 of The Scope. Accurate representation of what the book says about packaging, residue, and the sort. Clear connection in Part 3 of your paper between your example and the book's move. Generic references to "the book" or "what the book said" without specifics is the failure mode.

Dimension 2: You performed the diagnostic, not just described it. You answered the five questions concretely, on your chosen tradition, with real content in each answer. Listing the questions and giving hand-wavy answers is the failure mode.

Dimension 3: The sort you performed is actually the sort. Your example has all three parts of the pattern. Most importantly, you distinguished residue from packaging with specific origin tracing, not vague gestures at "things that don't belong." A paper that lists grievances against the current state of a tradition, without tracing origins and without naming the essence cleanly, does not pass this dimension regardless of how well written it is.

Dimension 4: The voice is yours. The video verifies this. The writing and the speaking sound like the same person, and that person sounds like they actually own the reasoning they are walking through. Scripted delivery is the failure mode.

Dimension 5: The transfer holds. This is the make-or-break dimension and it is what the assignment is ultimately for. The sorting move the book uses on Christianity operated successfully in your hands, outside of Christianity, on a piece of the world the book never discussed. You did not just study the move. You used it. The muscle is installed.

A student passes when the body of work passes on all five dimensions. A student does not yet pass when one or more dimensions show a deficiency significant enough to indicate that the move has not transferred. A student who does not yet pass receives written feedback identifying which dimensions need strengthening, and is invited to resubmit. The College's interest is in your formation, not in gatekeeping. There is no limit on the number of resubmissions. A student who arrives at a successful transfer after three attempts has passed, and the number of attempts is not recorded in the evaluation.

A Closing Word

You are about to do something the book did not do for you. The book showed you the move on Christianity and on the doctrine of the immortal soul. This assignment asks you to run the move somewhere the book did not go, on material the book did not cover, in a domain the book has nothing to say about.

This is the moment the course either worked or did not. If the move is yours now, you will find a confused tradition without much difficulty, you will enjoy finding it, and you will notice two or three more while you are writing the paper on the first one. If the move is not yours yet, you will struggle, and the instructor will give you feedback, and you will resubmit, and eventually the move will be yours. Either way you end the course with the muscle.

That is the whole point. The book is an instrument for building the muscle. The course is an instrument for testing whether the muscle was built. This assignment is the test.

Go find a tradition in the wild.