Senior Honors Project

As promised, here is a synopsis of my senior honors project. This is something that will go on my transcript, and it counts as a 4-credit class. Which means that I'm paying over 3 grand to do a project. And dang it, that means I'm going to do a good job. This is basically all on my own, so instead of having a professor teaching me something, I have a project advisor and two other committee members who work with me throughout the semester (and next semester, because actually it's basically a year long project, although we register for it for the fall semester, and then just finish it in the spring. That's actually when all the presenting to the community is done though, so a good portion of the work), keeping track of my work, guiding me, giving me direction, critiquing my project, and whatnot. They're actually the ones who say if I "pass" or not-basically, they have to evaluate all my work and the final project and say whether or not I did a good enough job for it to get a grade. I'm pretty sure we do actually get a grade for it too. Anyway. They do the final analysis, that's what's really important. But they help me through the whole thing too, so although I'm on my own, it's like I have a team sortof.

My project is largely theological, so my project advisor is also my theology advisor (the other faculty members are a pscyhology professor and my philosophy advisor). What I'm going to do is research various teachings on sexuality/sexual ethics/sex in general in the Catholic traditon (not past teachings, more of what the Church teaches now), as well as study the relationship between the Church teachings and the believer. What this basically means is studying not just what the Church teaches, but what the Church actually expects from the members of the church, what their teachings mean in a real-life context. That makes it a little complicated, because they (church leaders) don't just say, hey, this is what we say, this is what you do. That's largely how people think of it (it's mainly how I thought about it until my advisor helped me see otherwise) so that's going to add another dimension to my project. Finally, I'm going to do some sort of survey of members of the faith asking about their actual practices (obviously, this is going to be a completely anonymous study). Along with those questions, I'm going to include questions about how often they go to church, how much education they've had in their faith, how long they've been a member of the church, etc. Also how they understand the church's sexual ethics (as giving permission/forbidding certain things, or more as guidelines, or a theory of love/relationships, etc). That will help me analyze if experience/education in their faith makes any difference in how they practice it, and if the church is getting their teachings across to church members the way they want it to, or if they do a poor job of teaching and explaining not just the teachings themselves but what they actually expect from the believers. So, that's my project, with many different components, and I thought at one point that it wasn't going to be extensive enough. And I've narrowed it down quite a bit-I was going to look at multiple different religions, instead of just Catholicism, and then realized how difficult that would be. So instead of doing multiple religions, I'm just doing Catholicism, but I'm also going to survey either members of all other faiths besides Catholicism and use those as a control group, having Catholics be my variable obviously, or survey people who consider themselves non-religious. Not sure about that yet. Same questions and everything will apply, obviously.

That's my project-if anyone has any comments, questions, or articles/books that might be helpful for my project, that would be wonderful.

"Thank you, but I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds."