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Religion is a major aspect of every human culture. In all civilizations in the world, religion shapes the institutions of law and government, influences family and parenting practices, and resonates in the creative work of writers and artists. A liberal-arts education should include attention to human religiosity. Students well prepared in religious studies can better approach post-graduate work in law, medicine, public administration, or education.
The Religion Department offers instruction, from the introductory to the advanced level, in most of the world's major religious traditions: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, the religions of the ancient Near East, the religions of Africa, and religious life in ancient and modern China, and in North America. Almost all of the faculty specialize in a specific religious area and have expertise in the associated languages and history, since a philological and historical grounding is considered essential to a thorough understanding of a religion. Everyone teaching in the department also believes in the importance of comparing religious traditions and in studying religions in a comparative way. It is the department's insistence on an undergraduate major that is comparative and interdisciplinary in nature that distinguishes the study of religion at Dartmouth.
Each Fall the department sponsors a Foreign Study Program at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. This permits students to consider alternate approaches to the study of religion and to use the very different environment of the United Kingdom as a test case for understanding the interaction of religion and culture.
