What does it all mean?
In a world of conflict where intercultural understanding is of ever-growing importance, religious studies offers profound encounters with other people’s ways of imagining, thinking and living.
In religious studies, you will study the religions and world views that are so powerful in our culture, as well as major religious traditions from across the globe. Religion is a wealth of intriguing phenomena, from U.S. politics to Hebrew singing in synagogues to the centuries of text editing by Confucian scholars. Underlying such phenomena are perennial big questions: What are the greatest powers in the world? What does life mean and what are people’s ultimate goals? How do we find reliable guidance in life?
Human beings find themselves engaged by such “ultimate” questions; indeed, human life cannot be understood apart from them. Religious studies is dedicated to understanding human life — one’s own life included — in this light.
