Religion Degrees Online

Religion courses at Smith are critical and comparative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural. They examine the nature and function of religious phenomena in the past and present of many cultures. They provide opportunities to analyze systems of belief and patterns of religious behavior, the history of religious traditions, the functions of religion in society, and various forms of religious expression such as myth, ritual, sacred story, sacred texts, liturgy, and theological and philosophical reflection.

In the department’s view, a student’s personal religious perspective is not a consideration for entering or for successfully completing a course in the department. It is not unusual, however, for a student’s interest in religion studies to be motivated by personal, existential questions–the perennial questions of human existence. There is no better way for a person to work out her own answers than by studying the distillations of insight found in the world’s religious traditions.