Professor Anita Houck
Saint Mary's
College
Religious Studies 213
"Experiencing God"
Most of us would agree that religion has many aspects: beliefs and rituals, history and ethics,
holy writings and community traditions. So how does an individual's experience fit in? Can
experience help us answer questions about whether God exists or what the
divine might be like? This course will ask what approaches we should take in trying to understand
religious experience, and what religious experience can teach us. To wrestle with these questions,
we'll study different scholarly perspectives, among them psychology, literature, comparative
religion, politics, autobiography, and theology. By applying those tools, we'll try to learn how
to make sense of our own experiences and how to understand others', even when
they may be very different from ours.