Faculty Perspectives
Dr. Monica Miller
“Our courses offer students a really interesting, yet focused, intersectional and interdisciplinary way to think about religion as a social category, as a cultural category, as a historical phenomenon, but also as way to more philosophically or existentially make meaning.”
Dr. Robert Rozehnal
“We study how people live their faith and sometimes the gap between what ought to be of text and what is, the lived reality of religion as it is on the ground in everyday experience.”
Dr. Jodi Eichler-Levine
“In religious studies, we have something that I would call more generally the material and affective turn. We want to get more at the texture of everyday life, at objects, at sounds, at senses. What we call the religious sensorium.”
Dr. Benjamin Wright
“...when we talk about human behavior and the way that human beings act, we teach students how to be flexible and critical in their thinking and how to interact with the world around them…”
Dr. Christopher Driscoll
“(Religious Studies) provides knowledge of how issues connected to theory and method work, not only for the study of religion, but for the social sciences and the humanities in general.”
Dr. Khurram Hussain
“I think religion is a wonderful lens into that, into a certain kind of thinking about the rest of the world and about ourselves. It allows us to study people, how they make meaning in their lives and express those meanings in such forms as art, architecture, poetry, and literature.”