Any person who is adequately educated will have an informed understanding of religion and an appreciation of religion at its best. I teach in the Religious Studies Program to serve that end.

Tom W. Boyd, David Ross Boyd Emeritus Professor, Religious Studies

Scholarship and teaching are both forms of human relationship. The purpose of both is to enable the development of further relationships characterized by integrity and by an ongoing process of coming to understand. Both must therefore be governed by the same principles. The study of religions consists in listening to unfamiliar voices with sacrificial attention, constructing conceptual models that allow one to relate what one has heard to familiar categories, and then subjecting those models and categories to deconstruction through self-criticism and further acts of listening....Students should leave a course not so much with a new ability to talk about religion, as with what I like to call "listening knowledge": a basic mental map, and the skill to use and redraw it as they work to understand new religious voices that they encounter beyond the classroom.

David Vishanoff, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, Area of Speciality Islamic Studies

Most people consider religion to be the antithesis of violence and in many places and times religion has been a force for social justice and peace. There is an enduring tension between the peaceable garden cultures found in all religions and the holy warrior cultures which tell us that while it is ultimately right to love our neighbors, it may be our sacred duty to kill them. Struggles over nationalism in much of the world have spilled over into confrontation, and ethno-religious violence and violence between secular and religious nationalists within countries reach to the global level. The study of this phenomenon may include not only religion, but ethnicity and gender. My courses include women, religion, and secularism; nationalism and ethnic conflict; and religion and violence.

Jill Irvine, Associate Professor, Women's Studies and Religious Studies