Twilight Zone Christian Worldview Lessons

[DidoMachiatto]

I have started to put together a teaching unit on Teaching Christian Worldview using Twilight Zone. I used it with my 2 HS and 1MS dd, and it was very effective. It is part of a complete unit that I'll put online in the near future. 

 

Take a look at the site. Twilight Zone Worldview Lessons (Free)

I hope it helps!

Edited November 29, 2016 by DidoMachiatto

[Lang Syne Boardie]

DidoMachiatto, do your high schoolers study formal logic? I ask because as a Christian, I was curious about Christian worldview applied to the Twilight Zone, so I took a look at the lessons shared...as a classical home educator, I was surprised by the presuppositions in questions *about* Christian and "status quo" presuppositions, which caused me to look more closely. I found what I believe to be quite a few logical fallacies in this material.

 

Did your logic and rhetoric stage students raise any objections to these lessons?

 

Edited to add, after further thought: I'm surprised you never mentioned Orwell? As to recurring worldview/themes of the show, there are so many "lessons" that were included in The Twilight Zone as the point of the project, that I don't really understand the goal of distilling them down into questions like, "How are these aliens like God?" or "Where in the Bible do you learn that lying is bad?" Could you please explain the purpose of the lessons, if you have time?

 

As I was thinking about this just now, Google led me to this interesting article about the themes of The Twilight Zone, by Arlen Schumer. It begins by quoting Village Voice film critic Jay Hoberman from 1990,

 

"The Twilight Zone doesn’t only belong to a brief but distinctive epoch in our recent past—it could almost provide that period with a name,†wrote Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman in 1990. “The Twilight Zone defined the shadowy transition between the Fabulous Fifties and the Psychedelic Sixties. The show’s span encompassed the birth of the Space Race, the flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, and the life and death of the New Frontier...as the aspirin-ad angst music, op art patterns and beatnik bongos of the series’ celebrated credit sequence suggest, this historical twilight zone was a time of affluence and anxiety, of suave hysteria with a continual backbeat of crisis.†As author Jonathan (For tress of Solitude) Lethem, writing about Serling on the online magazine Gadfly in 1999 noted, “Just the titles of his best episodes read like a found poem of All-American dread: Where Is Everybody? Walking Distance. People Are Alike All Over. Time Enough At Last. The Obsolete Man. Eye of the Beholder. Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room. The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. The After Hours...†(Hoberman)

"Rod Serling’s acute ability to identify both primal and post-war American fears and crises, then build stories around them, set in commonplace surroundings—a psycho-American Gothic of sorts—was perhaps the single factor most responsible for the success and longevity of The Twilight Zone." (Schumer)

 

 

 

How could worldview lessons about The Twilight Zone omit these themes entirely?

 

 

 

Edited November 29, 2016 by Tibbie Dunbar