Vonnegut: how to get a degree

Apropos of checking out Kurt Vonnegut's use of science and anthropology in his science fiction, I found this amusing wee story. Vonnegut is the writer:

 I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat’s Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree

Now this got my attention because I recently suggested to  a colleague that a possible assessment task relating to church history might be to rewrite the endings to a couple of short stories I read. They are alternative timeline stories where the writers manage to rewrite Christianity out of the picture. The task I would set would be to take the story on a bit further, take on the 'what if' of the story but develop the story in such a way that Christian faith endures in the timeline. The assessment criteria would be historical plausibility (which would rest on a good understanding of the actual history) and theological integrity in relation to the context.


The book is below and the particular stories to think on (though there are at least two others worth considering) The Wandering Christian and A Letter from the Pope.


Of course the other interesting thing is that people want to write Christianity out of history.