Are you concerned to know more about your Christian faith? Do you seek insight into the intellectual, spiritual, and liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church? Are you interested in understanding the forces shaping modern culture and in seeing how religion figures in that process? Would you like to develop an historical and theological perspective from which to evaluate current trends? If your answer is 'yes' to these questions, then Religious Studies is a major you will find enlightening and challenging.

What will I study in Religious Studies?

Rituals, ideas about what's ultimate, symbols, myths, gender, philosophies, sexuality, politics, values, literature, poetry, art... anything from abortion to Zen, from Krishna to Christmas, from the ancestral dead to the Grateful Dead.

Why would anyone want to study that?

To learn about people. By studying religion, you learn how whole cultures, past and present, have imagined the universe and how they are able to live in it. You will also learn some of the enduring questions that humans have confronted and some major answers to those questions. You will learn a great deal about the world around you: struggles in the Middle East, the continuing impact of the Bible and the Christian tradition on issues of gender and sexuality, the vexing moral questions on the frontiers of medicine and science. You will also learn about yourself: where many of your ideas and values came from, how they compare with others, what implications they have.

Do I have to be religious to major in Religious Studies?

No! Do you have to be incredibly old to be a History major? Invisible to the naked eye to be a Microbiology major? A planet to be a Geology major? On the other hand, you can be deeply religious and major in Religious Studies. It just isn't required for choosing this major; and in any event, you will be studying traditions beyond what you might have been raised in.

How will I tell my parents and friends that I'm majoring in Religious Studies?

Tell them you've decided to spend all this time, money, and effort on something that will matter to you thirty years from now. In other words, tell them that you intend to take your college education seriously.

(The above was adapted with minor modifications from Dr. Eugene Clay of Arizona State University.)



Some students study religion to prepare for a career in high school teaching or religious ministry. Others plan to proceed to graduate work in theology or religious studies in anticipation of a university career. Most students, however, major in theology simply because they find the study fascinating and rewarding. As an inherently interdisciplinary field, theology is an ideal liberal arts major. Through close study of influential theological and religious texts, rituals, and artifacts, students learn about their own faith and our common culture. Beyond these points, studying religion is practical in several less obvious ways.


The following is an article entitled "Why Study Religion?" It was authored by Prof. Jacob Neusner of Brown University.





"Religion is so powerful a force in the contemporary world that without knowledge of religion we scarcely can understand the daily newspapers. A fair example of what happens when people do not know how to make sense of the power of religions in contempoary life is our country's difficulty in understanding the Islamic revolution in Iran, not to mention the Judaic revolution in the State of Israel, the Protestant army of Northern Ireland, the Roman Catholic revolutions in Poland and in Latin America, the Christian army of Lebanon, the tragedy at Jamestown and many continuing evidences of the vitality of religious belief--sometimes healthy, sometimes perverse.

"There is a bias against religion as a force in culture and psychology. Intellectuals in general, and the political left in particular, assume that religion is dead and that God never was. This is surely one possible way of thinking about the character and meaning of society and of life. According to this viewpoint, religion is dying; as we know it, it is a holdover from another age. People who hold this view therefore claim that religion does not require study. Those of us who find religion an exceptionally interesting phenomenon of society and culture, imagination and the heart, can do little to overcome this bias. But it is a bias, for it rests upon the will to wish religion away, not upon the perception that religion has gone away.

"In fact, much of the world as we know it is shaped by the formation of society and culture around religious beliefs, by the way in which people refer to religions to make their choices about how they will live. These beliefs and choices invoke particular modes of supernaturalism, call upon distinctive expressions of revelation, and reflect different ways of looking at and finding God. A nation like ours, in which institutions of religion exercise vast influence over citizens' political and cultural decisions, is wise not to deny that religion is a formative force in contemporary life. Whether or not people want religions to exercise that power, they do. In fact, religions not only speak about supernatural powers, they also constitute powerful forces in this world. So it is a matter of fact that if people do not understand the character of religions, they cannot make sense of much that happens in the world today.

"Nor need we dwell on a more obvious fact. To understand where humankind has been, to make sense of the heritage of world civilization, the transcendent side of the human imagination and of society and culture constitutes a definitive dimension. There is no understanding of humanity without the confrontation with the religious heritage and hope, whatever may be our judgment of the value of the heritage and the hope. So far as universitites propose to teach how to interpret the world in which we live, organizing courses and departments of religious studies is a perfectly natural way of teaching what must be taught.

"When we study religion, we study the subject that unifies all the other subjects of the humanities. Until our own time and in many places in our own time, religion is the center of human life. If we do not study religion, we are not studying what is important about ourselves in the world."






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