Depart Chair: Dr. Harold V. Bennett (Professor)
Faculty: Dr. Lawrence Carter (Professor), Dr. Aaron Parker (Associate Professor)
Program Overview:
The Program in Religion is an organized, active effort at exploring religious phenomena and at inculcating self-examination of one’s assumptions and religious convictions and seeking to understand the complicated relationship among individuals, cultures, and faiths. The Program in religion examines the limits of reason, faith, and evidence by exposing religious data to probing intellectual analyses. The work in this area describes, analyzes, and evaluates the role of religion in the life of humans since the earliest times and how the religious quest contributes toward human growth and fulfillment. It examines most of the perennial existential questions to which humankind endeavors to answer.
The Program in Religion utilizes approaches from the humanities and social sciences to cast light on the diverse beliefs and practices in faith traditions of societies and cultures such as notions of the Sacred, classical theism, community, religious institutions, religious language, miracles, suffering, evil, morality, the afterlife, anthropology, religious experience, rituals, and symbols. Students also explore the concept of truth, spiritual dimensions of the human condition, religious texts, the tension between religion and science, and the interplay between religion and politics, psychology, economics, and a host of other phenomena that comprise the human scene.
It is noteworthy to mention that the Program in religion at Morehouse gives attention to the various roles religion played and continues to play in the Black experience. Therefore, engaging specific conversations and viewing select data and phenomena in religious studies occur through an Afrocentric lens. Students also develop culturally sensitive ways to view diverse peoples, societies, politics, events, cultures, and other developments both on the local and international scenes.
Student learning outcomes
Students who concentrate in Religion will be able to engage in informed critical self-reflection and assessment of their personal religious beliefs, language, rituals, and experiences.
Students who concentrate in Religion will be able to discuss respectfully and objectively the world’s religions as historical and cultural phenomena. They will be able to engage in conversations and analyses of the history, sacred texts, fundamental beliefs, rituals, worldviews, and institutions of African Traditional Religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism.
Students who concentrate in Religion acquire the skills to evaluate the role religion plays in societies and cultures. They will be able to assess the interplay between fundamental beliefs in religious traditions and social ethics, conversations about gender and identity, politics, social institutions, and economics. Students, too, will be able to appraise fundamentalism, new religious movements globalization, secularization, and other ways in which religion interacts and relates to contemporary society and social processes.
Students who concentrate in Religion also will be able to critique the relationship between religion and the Black experience in America; express and appraise basic features of religion in the West Coast of Sub-Saharan Africa before the West Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, they will be able to understand the religion of the enslaved, Black Christianity, the Nation of Islam, Black-Hebrew-Israelite Jews, and other Black religious movements in America.
Students who concentrate in Religion acquire the skills to write effectively and communicate clearly. They will be able to articulate their ideas cogently and coherently regardless of whether it is in written or spoken form, or to an academic or professional audience.
Department policies and/or General Education modifications:
- • A minimum grade of C is required for all Religion courses that apply towards the major or minor.
- • Any Major may qualify for Program Honors in Religion by satisfying the following criteria: (1) earning at least a 3.5 grade-point average in Religion; (2) and completing a research paper on a topic approved by the Program and in accordance with the program’s regulations.
