Religious Studies Major

The Department of Religious Studies is committed to exploring and analyzing religion in a non-sectarian way. Our courses cover a variety of religious traditions embedded in myth, ritual, art, ethics, doctrine, philosophy, literature, asceticism and other social practices. First and foremost, the study of religion engages the human-the limits of human beings as they have multifariously expressed them: in their audacious explanations of the invisible, the immaterial and the transcendental; in the extremity of their practices and beliefs; in the ordinary ways in which they confront the overwhelming presence of violence, suffering and death; in the emotive terms they provide to explain the significance of the past and the future; and in the constant struggle to come to terms with themselves and others. These activities, whether explicitly identified as religious or not, represent the persistent grappling of human beings with what different cultures throughout world history have articulated as beyond and more than the human. This human engagement with the variously formulated more-than-human Other, this engagement manifesting itself variously in many arenas of cultures, is the object of the academic study of religion. As such, the field demands an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the methodologies native to the humanities and social sciences as well as on the theoretical approaches developed specifically in the study of religion.