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The department of Religious Studies encourages an inquisitive, analytical, and open approach to multiple religious perspectives; it also encourages students’ awareness of their own value frameworks through the exploration of the value frameworks in various religious perspectives.
The religious studies program studies offers an array of courses that provide broad exposure to diverse religious texts, traditions, practices, and themes throughout various world cultures/regions from the ancient to the modern periods. The program focuses on the intersection of religious meanings and specific cultural contexts that shape those meanings. The approach to the study of religion is therefore largely interdisciplinary, with any single course providing exposure to several different methods of analysis and interpretation.
The religious studies program at Beloit College is devoted to pursuing a study of religion that is socially meaningful, culturally and historically aware, and academically responsible. We locate religious and other systems of meaning within the sociocultural environments in which they are manifest. Part of the philosophy and religious studies department, the program offers an undergraduate interdisciplinary degree program for both majors and minors in religious studies, as well as a wide array of courses relevant to students in other disciplines.
Religious studies provides an ideal focus for a liberal arts education, which should be about opening one's mind to life's most profound questions. Long before most current subjects found their way into college and university programs, the academic study of religion served as a primary means of inquiry in literary, historical, philosophical and cultural studies, among others. It continues to be an exceptionally broad field of study, drawing together the widest possible range of concerns.
The Religion major is predicated on the belief that life and society are made better and that individual happiness and national character are enhanced by the time-proven values that characterize the great religious teachings of the world.
The goal of Hamilton's Religious Studies Department is to provide students with an understanding of religion not simply as social institution or dogma, but as a powerful facet of human experience and culture.
In the Humanities Division, you'll ask the big questions. What is the nature of ultimate reality? What is the meaning of human existence? What is our role in the world? How have other people past and present addressed these questions? Why and why did things happen the way they did? Could history have taken a different course? Can things be different in the future?
The Religion major consists of eight courses and requires both broad exposure to major approaches to studying religion and concentrated study in some aspect of religion. The requirements are organized in five parts:
The concentration in religion provides an understanding of major religious traditions, an exposure to a variety of approaches employed within the study of religion, and an opportunity for exploration of diverse problems that religiosities seek to address. Many of todayʼs pressing political and social problems can be better understood with more knowledge about the religious practices that undergird them.
The goal of the study of religion at a secular college is religious literacy. Religious literacy, an important dimension of cultural literacy, entails both a cognitive component (knowledge of religions and of the religious dimension of culture) and proficiencies (the acquiring of skills relevant to the analysis of religion). Courses in religion have the objective of conveying knowledge in four areas (Asian Religions, Modern Western Religious Thought, Near Eastern Religions, and Religion in America), and of developing skills of analysis, interpretation, and communication.
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