What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Religion?
There are a multitude of answers to that question, and our Introduction to Religious Studies course provides undergraduate students with an entryway into a longstanding conversation—involving insiders, outsiders, and those in between—around the meanings of a word that indexes ideas of god and the gods, of origins and ends, and of the proper places of humans (and everything else, including animals) above, in, and below the globe. Talk about religion today is, in fact, cheap. We aim to promote a grammatical currency (morphology, vocabulary, syntax) to enhance the value of such talk. -- Ryan Coyne, PhD ‘08, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religions and Theology