Why is it that the ways of thinking and living that people call “religious” are often judged by outsiders to be potentially harmful forms of delusion, while those who adhere to those lifeways understand them instead as providing access to what scholar Robert Orsi calls “the really real”?

Why Beloit?

The Religious Studies program at Beloit College seeks not only to understand the lifeways of religious communities, past and present, local and global, but also to engage with those lifeways as resources for enriching and challenging our own conceptions of life and world and for developing different ways of living and thinking. We focus on developing a deep understanding of different ways of knowing and living in the world and exploring their relationship to power structures and social identities. Students gain skills for cross-cultural dialogue and understanding through investigating their own assumptions and practices in light of the lifeways of others.

Join us in exploring religion as it intersects with such topics as  racial and social justice, human embodiment, global affairs, and the very nature of reality.