This essay was my senior thesis for my religious studies B.A. I decided to focus on Native American spirituality because of a course I took that fall with Jacquelyn Bralove, who had lived and worked on the Navajo reservation for five years. (This led to my time spent volunteering on the reservation for the next two summers.)

There are a number of problems with this essay still, but I think the central ideas are sound. What I was most impressed with when I first began studying various tribal religions was the immediacy and all-pervasiveness of “the sacred.” This was a sharp contrast to the distant Southern Baptist Christianity I had grown up with. Looking back at this essay, I can see myself trying to impress the reader with the same sense of powerful difference I found in a worldview that “reified” the sacred.

For what it’s worth, here it is …