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.
This fall, the Teaching Religion in Public (TRiP) reading group will be exploring the theme of failure. Religion has a lot to say about failure and so do scholars of religion. Religious practitioners explain ritual failures and unanswered prayers. Religion orients and frames personal failures. Failure, much like pain, can be read as an instrument of divine instruction.
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Join us at 7pm on Wednesday, November 18, 2020 as Provost Professor Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Department of Religious Studies, will discuss Joan of Arc’s story and what it tells us about the relationship of religion, law, and politics. Following her presentation, Sullivan will be joined by Constance Furey, Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies, for a moderated Q&A session.
Register for the event
Join the Medieval Studies Institute Alumni Lecture on November 13th at 2:00pm where Prof. Diane Fruchtman (Assistant Professor of Religion, Rutgers University) will explore the ‘life of martyrdom’ that Augustine enjoined, and examine some of the rhetorical techniques he employed to induce that life of martyrdom in his audiences.
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The Center for Religion & the Human presents the Iris Book Award: Prize Ceremony, Reading, and Discussion with author David George Haskell, and guest speakers Kocku von Stuckrad and David Abram, moderated by Lisa Sideris. Funded by a grant from the Luce Foundation. Saturday, Sept 26th, 12pm.
Watch the recording
Patrick Lally Michelson’s “Russian Orthodox Thought in the Church’s Clerical Academies” was recently published in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020). The article explores various currents of academic thought in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Russian Orthodoxy.
More about the publication
Erik J. Hammerstrom, who earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Indiana University in 2010, just published his second book, The Huayan University Network: The Teaching and Practice of Avataṃsaka Buddhism in Twentieth-Century China, with Columbia University Press.
Read more about his book
"R&L" is a series of workshops that brings together scholars working at the nexus of religion and literature in a wide range of literary and religious traditions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts: from contemporary poetics of the Black Sacred to those underlying Chinese Confucianism, from colonial Latin America to medieval Europe and Japan, from poetry, plays, and novels to picture books.
Learn more about the projectOur 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.
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