Mistakes

Having gotten to later miracles in Milagros de Nuestra Señora, I have found myself very wrong about a few things. Firstly, not all of the miracles have a male as a sinner. This makes the feminist in me very happy. However, I do have a few thoughts on the significance that miracle #21 has a pregnant religious woman. She is the sinner in that story. My modern mind doesn't like the fact that the man is not seen as a sinner. However, I can appreciate the fact that the woman had taken very specific vows of chastity. It still irks me slightly. Secondly, not all of those who find themselves receiving help from Mary are Christian. I don't know how I feel about this. Spain has had some anti-Semitic feelings for, well, most of its history. My gut reaction is to say that it is anti-Semitic because the author pins a Jew for sinning but then I realize that the author pins everyone for sinning. Using a Jew is just to illustrate one of the basic ideas of Milagros: everyone can be, and is, a sinner. Jews, Christians, men, women, priests, and nuns are all sinners.

Well, I need to finish up an annotated bibliography for tomorrow. It's the first one I've ever done. It's kind of a pain in the neck but I can definitely see the appeal. It's great to have a run down of books that could be useful for a paper (and why) and a list of books that have nothing to do with the paper. It's hard to really say which ones are "useful" right now because I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is my thesis. Then again, I think that's why I'm making an annotated bibliography. One of my former teachers advised us that we had to go through a lot of books and articles to get an inspiration for the paper and then we could think about our topic. We had to wade through books on Don Quixote and then, by reading some, find what interested us. Then we could go back and pick the books that discussed in detail the topic we had decided upon. That was the first teacher that ever told me how to start a research paper. I am very grateful for that lesson.