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ON COMMON GROUND Guide for Teachers and Students
Index: The Comparative Thematic Index enables you to access the material in ON COMMON GROUND across the fifteen religious traditions and the other sections of the program. Use the Index, for example, to find out about holidays in many different traditions or to find all the essays in the CD-ROM that focus on conversion or church-state relations. From each screen accessed through the Index, you can press Retrace to take you back to your place in the Index. You can access the Index by pressing the Index button on the right-hand navigation strip or by selecting the Resources item on the menu bar.
Directory: The Pluralism Project Directory may be accessed under the Resources menu. This is not a comprehensive directory, as it contains only the databases of the Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh, Zoroastrian centers, and Interfaith councils in the United States. These may be accessed by either tradition or state. Because more detailed information about Christian and Jewish congregations can be found in the Yellow Pages of telephone directories, we have made no effort to include it here. For resources on the other religious traditions treated here, see the Info section of each tradition. The Native American Info section, for example, lists several comprehensive directories of Native American tribal centers and cultural museums.
Navigational Tools
Menus: By using the menu bar, you can jump quickly to a specific screen in the program. No matter what section you are in, the four menus—File, Resources, Bookmark, and Contentsare always present. As you move from section to section and from topic to topic within each section, the remaining menus change to reflect the availability of new information. For example, the sequence of menus File, Resources, Bookmark, Contents, Landscape, Seattle indicates that you are in the Seattle section of A New Religious Landscape. Clicking on the Landscape menu brings up a list of the other cities and regions in this section, and clicking on the Seattle menu displays a list of the many religious centers in Seattle. For more detailed instructions, click on the Help button on the right side of the screen, or release on Help under the File menu above.
Buttons: You may also navigate through the CD-ROM by clicking on the various buttons located on the screen itself, to the right of the screen, or in the lower right-hand portion of the screen. You can move forward or backward through the series of essays by clicking on the yellow and red forward or backward arrow buttons in the lower right portion of the screen. Onscreen buttons also indicate the presence of movies, audio files, or documents. For more detailed instructions on using these buttons, click on the Help button on the right side of the screen, or release on Help under the File menu above.
Retrace: The Retrace button, located on the right side of the screen, is an invaluable navigational aid. Clicking on it allows you to "retrace" your steps back through the program, revisiting in reverse sequence the screens you have already seen. If you lose track of your location, you may retrace your steps back to more familiar territory. Quitting ON COMMON GROUND clears your retrace path from memory.
