Our Religious Studies students are equipped to understand our diverse and rapidly changing world while learning much about themselves. This comparative field of study imbues students with the ability to assess diverse actions, traditions, and values. The knowledge and habits of mind learned in Religious Studies remain relevant forever, as key to a life of conscious choice and thoughtful, multi-cultural engagement.
Religious Studies courses help you examine your core values, both objectively and in terms of personal experience. In our classes, you will explore how people make sense of the world and enhance your global cultural knowledge as you engage in a wide variety of topics from barbecue to baseball, magic to mindfulness, and sexuality to the sacred.
The Department of Religious Studies wishes Rebecca Manring, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Language Instruction for the Dhar India Studies Program, a fulfilling and well-deserved retirement retirement.
Read about Rebecca Manring
The Center for Religion and the Human has been hosting a reading group this semester where students and faculty from a range of schools and department across IU gather to read, think, and discuss capaciously together across the two operative terms “religion” and “music.”
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Grace Morris and Prof. Constance Furey are holding a Mysticism Reading Group. The group, which meets biweekly starting on Sept 25, will be discussing primary source texts relating to mysticism, starting with Women Mystics in Medieval Europe.
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Mormonism in Five Minutes, part of the Equinox Religion in Five Minutes series, includes five articles by dual PhD candidate Colby Townsend (English & religious studies).
Read about the project
Prof. Sonia Velázquez presented work on anarchic joy in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote at the Cervantes Society of America Biennial Conference held at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Read about the conferenceOur department is home to an incredible community of teachers and students ready to support your intellectual and personal pursuits. We are innovative and open-minded researchers who welcome unconventional ideas to help us better understand the role religion plays in culture and society.
The study of religion broadens and deepens your understanding of the diverse richness and mystery that attends being human. Our faculty is engaged in research through the LUCE-funded Being Human project to learn more about what it means to be human in our rapidly changing world.
The College of Arts