Introduction to the Department

The Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality carries the institutional responsibility for identifying, exploring, and examining the religious and spiritual phenomena of human life, experience, culture, and history. The Faculty of the Department investigates how religious and spiritual communities and traditions, on the one hand, have emerged as vital aspects of human cultures and, on the other hand, also have shaped those cultures. Rather than advocating religions or any particular religious or spiritual perspective, academic studies of religions and spiritualities at Berea College identify, describe, and analyze the diversity of religious phenomena, experience, traditions, communities, and issues. Academic studies of religions and spiritualities explore forms in and through which humans have both articulated and responded to their most profound and persistent questions about the universe, human nature, the human condition, personal and social morality, human community, ultimate or sacred reality, and religious ways of knowing. The Faculty of the Department investigates ways in which humans have expressed or exercised the spiritual dimension of human life institutionally, socially, politically, psychologically, economically, ritually, morally, rhetorically, textually, intellectually, aesthetically, and personally.

Acknowledging both the multi-disciplinary and the interdisciplinary requirements to investigate this vast field of study, those who teach in the Department both employ and rely upon a wide variety of disciplinary or methodological approaches in their studies of and teaching about religious and spiritual phenomena. The Faculty of the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality examines a wide variety of religious and spiritual phenomena, including the major religious traditions and communities of the world, with historiographical, linguistic and literary, social-scientific, anthropological, philosophical, and theological methods of analysis and interpretation. As a result of the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary character of such academic inquiries, the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality cross-lists selected courses from its curriculum in the curricula of several other academic fields of study as well.

Academic studies of religions and spiritualities enable students to explore many different human perspectives on the world, human life, and ultimate human concerns that appear within diverse cultures, across all historical periods, and through many human traditions. The Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality provides several interrelated opportunities for students to pursue:

The Faculty of the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality has designed the curriculum for students with interests in interdisciplinary (historiographical, philosophical, theological, sociological, psychological, anthropological, aesthetic, literary-critical, cultural) approaches to studies of religions and spiritualities. Students who focus their studies in other fields and disciplines (e.g., Art and Art History, Asian Studies, Child and Family Studies, Economics and Business, Education Studies, English, History, Nursing, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Peace and Social Justice Studies, Sociology, Sustainability and Environmental Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, among several other potential areas of study) may profitably study the religious and spiritual dimensions of those other bodies of human knowledge either through individual courses that contribute to their academic majors or minors, or by taking an additional academic major or minor in studies of religions and spirituality.

As a result, courses in studies of religions and spirituality provide occasions for students to discover, to examine, and to understand the major dimensions of various religious and spiritual communities and traditions of the world: (a) varieties of experiences and emotions; (b) institutions, social organization and governance, forms and styles of leadership; (c) moral codes, behavior, and systems; (d) rituals; (e) sacred texts and narratives; (f) art, symbols, and architecture; and (g) beliefs, doctrines, or teachings. Through its curriculum, the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality offers both an academic major and an academic minor as basic foundations or backgrounds for graduate studies in several other or related fields for students who have interests in a variety of careers or vocations: such as, religious ministry of various kinds, teaching, journalism, politics, economics, law, social work, business, and medicine. The Department also offers introductory courses to students who pursue other academic majors to encourage the exploration of religions and spiritualities in all their diversity as a support for studies in many other fields as well.

The Faculty in the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality primarily pursues academic studies of religious, spiritual, and related phenomena at Berea College as neither religious (or advocative) nor anti-religious (or antagonistic) approaches to religious and spiritual phenomena, but rather as the neutral or non-religious academic exploration and examination of religions and spirituality. Thus, the departmental Faculty intentionally signals four essential features of the Department’s historic and contemporary commitments to teaching and research in this vast cultural field of study: (a) pursuit of descriptive rather than prescriptive goals in teaching about spirituality and religions; (b) maintenance of a contextual and cross-cultural scope in inquiries about religious and spiritual phenomena; (c) demonstration of genuine multi-disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity through employment of methods that encompass frameworks in both the social sciences and the human sciences or humanities for identifying, analyzing, and understanding religious and spiritual phenomena; and (d) insistence, however, that the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of religious and spiritual phenomena do not reduce those phenomena to the respective “non-religious forms of behavior” to which the multiple academic methods and disciplines refer in various ways.¹

Welcome to the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality!

Enthusiastically and Expectantly,

Rev. Jeff B. Pool, Ph.D.
Chairperson, Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality Eli Lilly Chair in Religion and Culture
Professor of Religion