About Us
Religious Studies offers a lens for understanding the contemporary world with nuance and rigor. Our classes invite students to explore how people throughout time and across cultures have debated what it means to be human, sought to engage with the world meaningfully, and worked to build better worlds for themselves and others. Regardless of major or future trajectory, Religious Studies enables students sharpen their understanding of the rich complexity of the world as it is today as well as the vast array of ways that people in other times and places have engaged with their worlds.
The study of religion raises questions that are simultaneously timely and timeless. We approach religion as a set of concerns and commitments that are woven into every aspect of social, cultural, and political life. We do this by examining how people grapple with the most fundamental questions, engage with the world and one another, read and debate sacred texts, experience the divine, negotiate conflict, and endeavor to win arguments. Our classes interrogate how religion intersects with a vast array of pressing issues—economics, gender and sexuality, the environment, politics, psychology, colonialism, science, art, and medicine, to name a few.
The Department of Religious Studies welcomes students of all different religious and non-religious background. Classes in the department do not offer prescribed answers but instead equip you with skills to ask sharper questions and refine your own conclusions.
Come Study with Us
Join us in this intellectually enriching adventure as a major, a minor, or for individual courses. Given the multifaceted nature of the study of religion, many of our courses will serve as useful complements for students primarily interested in other fields—sociology, political sciences, public policy, education, history, art history, law, cultural anthropology, or medicine.
To our study of religion we welcome students of different religious and non-religious backgrounds. Our Department wants to reflect fully the diversity and complexity of today’s world – and of Duke’s campus! While being respectful of all religious traditions in their various manifestations, we will at the same time ask critical questions and always consider different answers in our attempt to understand better any individual religious tradition as well as the place of religion in human society.