About the Major

Religious Studies concentrators, working closely with their advisors in the department, will study several traditions from those explored in our courses, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Indigenous traditions, Islam, and Jewish thought and life. This study is necessarily interdisciplinary, and will expose students to a variety of methods and interpretive strategies, including archaeological, ethnographical, feminist, historical, literary and hermeneutic, philosophical, post-colonial, psychological, and sociological.

Among the topics you will study are: what is problematic about the very concept of “religion” as something universal; interreligious interactions; the nature of hierarchies and social processes; the lived experience of sacred spaces, and pilgrimages; conflict and co-existence; the complex and fluid nature of ethics, race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality in connection with religious traditions.