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Religion, Spirituality, & Society

1500 N. Warner St. CMB 1028
Tacoma, WA 98416-1028

Wyatt Hall 137

253.879.3745

Administrative Support

Connie Baird

Program Description

For students seeking a socially engaged liberal arts education, the Department of Religion, Spirituality, and Society explores questions of power, knowledge, and identity as they relate to religious traditions. While developing a deeper understanding of oneself as a situated knower, students also explore individual religious traditions in depth, as well as broad themes such as the following: myth, ritual, and symbol; mysticism, magic, and medicine; beginning and end times; ethics, law, and moral philosophy; oppression and liberation; pacifism and violence; animals, bodies, and emotions. Courses are conducted with attention to structures and institutions of class, gender, sexuality, and race in their cultural and historical contexts.

For the major and minor in Religion, Spirituality, and Socity, the faculty provides an introduction to the academic discipline followed by careful probing of two or more important traditions and a consideration of the methods useful to their study. A major or minor provides opportunities to develop excellent skills in writing, analysis, and argumentation and serves as an exceptional stepping stone to graduate or professional school. Past majors have gone on to excel in the non-profit sector, law school, medical school, doctoral programs, social work, creative writing, marketing and business, among other vocations.

 

Who You Could Be

  • Medical doctor
  • Journalist
  • Lawyer
  • Curator
  • Foreign service
  • Recording artist
  • K-12 educator, professor
  • Hospital chaplain, ethicist

 

 

What You'll Learn

  • How religion intersects with the political, cultural, racial, economic, artistic, and moral dimensions of people's lives
  • An understanding of a range of religious traditions, including Asian and Abrahamic religions and new religious movements
  • Critical thinking and writing skills fundamental to a wide variety of careers
  • Connections between religion, ethics, and the practice of social justice 
SAMPLE COURSES

This course investigates and attempts to distinguish, identify, and understand the different modes and aspects of the mind and self in yoga, meditation, psychedelics, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy in a variety of cultural contexts. The class examines the fundamental question of identity and the question, "Who am I?" Primary texts include Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, Plato's Phaedo and Symposium, Freud's metapsychological essays, Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind, and David Presti on the mind/brain problem.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

This course provides students with tools of ethical analysis so that they can think critically about pressing contemporary moral issues through the lens of justice. The course focuses on ethical methods from world Christianity and western philosophy. The course introduces both ethical theories and justice theories, and examines multicultural perspectives of the long-standing religious, theological, and philosophical understanding of justice. It analyzes how social justice concepts have been applied in different cultural contexts, including nonwestern communities. Students examine different models of justice and their implications for contemporary moral issues (e.g. racism, healthcare, social welfare, capital punishment, human rights, immigration, refugees, property rights, and the environment). The class includes interactive lectures on justice theories and students actively participate in discussions on selected case studies. Course readings may include excerpts from Aristotle, Aquinas, Mill, Locke, Calvin, Kant, Rawls, Sandel, Nussbaum, Singer, Cone, Williams, Hauerwas, and Ahn.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic PerspectivesKnowledge, Identity, and Power

How does social change happen? Religious groups were central to many instances of transformative social activism like the Civil Rights movement, Feminism and Occupy Wall Street. This course addresses how religious beliefs, identities, affiliations, and practices shape social activism and justice in the United States and the world. The class examines the multiple ways that religion intersects with power and resistance with particular attention to how religion acts as a resource and identity for enacting both reformative and radical social change. The course uses history, fiction, sociology and theory to examine religion in both conservative and progressive movements including Immigrant rights, Prison Abolition, the Civil Rights movement, white supremacy past and present, suffrage and voting rights, reproductive rights, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Students will have the opportunity to do oral histories of people involved in religious activism and study a movement or group in depth.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic PerspectivesKnowledge, Identity, and Power

What do the lamb of God and White Buffalo Woman have in common? For one thing, they illustrate the sometimes-blurry intersection of humans, animals, and the divine; for another, they illustrate the powerful role played by animals in the religious imagination. As the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked, "animals are good to think." As others have pointed out, they're also good to eat, ride, look at, hunt, train for battle, make things out of, and keep as companions. In religion, animals have additionally served as sacrificial offerings, totems, signifiers of purity and pollution, and foreshadowers of the apocalypse. In this class students begin to trace the vast interplay between human and non-human animals in the history of religion. Drawing from the emerging field of Critical Animal Studies, Japanimals weaves together rigorous critical theoretical inquiry with case studies drawn broadly from the history of religions, with a particular focus on case studies from Japan. Students emerge from this course able to articulate how different religious traditions have viewed animals, how religions have influenced modern conceptions of animals, and how religious traditions may (or may not) provide resources for addressing contemporary challenges facing human and non-human animals.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

This course examines multiple configurations of and debates about gender and sexuality in Muslim societies. Topics covered include gender in the Qur'an, sex in Sufi poetry, Islamic laws on sexuality and gendered difference, masculinity, non-binary genders, and queerness in disparate Muslim contexts. The course will also explore links between some feminisms and imperialism, the ways that colonialism has shaped gendered discourses, and the ties between Islamophobia, homophobia, and foreign interventionism. Students will be immersed in art, ethnographic accounts, legal literature, theology, and film about these topics.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic PerspectivesKnowledge, Identity, and Power

Do religions originate in myths of violence, and then re-enact them, as in the Eucharist? How do sacred texts enshrine and commemorate violence? How do religions motivate, justify or reinforce violence? What role does ritual play in re-enacting violence? What roles do eschatological expectations play in violence? How has the postcolonial world grappled with the questions of religious violence? This class explores historical case studies in the relationship between religion and violence, such as the Christian doctrine of just war and the Crusades, the history and practice of Islamic ideas of jihad, or Hindu nationalistic violence. We also consider the question of self-inflicted violence and suffering, as performed in religious rituals. Students read theoretical works and examine case studies; students are encouraged to elaborate their own understanding of the nature of religion and violence.

Code
Connections 200-400 Level

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Students gain experience in a variety of ways:

  • Taught by Professor Tanya Erzen, REL 307: Prisons, Gender, and Education brings students out of the classroom and into the local women's prison education program. Learn more about Freedom Education Project Puget Sound.
  • Emily Laliotis '18 published her paper, "Becoming Byzantine," in the department journal, Relics, Remnant, and Religion: A publication by and for Religious Studies Students
  • Kylie Gurewitz '20 was selected as a University Writing Excellence Award Winner for her paper, "Solitary Confinement and Intersubjectivity: Social Liminality in Prison"
  • Summer research grant projects, such as Quinn O'Connor '25, "Attitudes of veterans 75+ toward aging" or Ayana Peterson Henry '26, "St. Augustine in the student section: A look into religion's impact on college sports"

JOBS

Our alumni work at: 

  • American Psychological Association (writer, editor)
  • Religion and Hebrew school teacher
  • Sawhorse Revolution (operations director)
  • Tacoma Public Schools (elementary school teacher)
  • Global Impact (business strategy associate)
  • Jewish National Fund (Israel programs admission director)
  • Amazon (senior program manager)
  • Washington State Department of Health Services (disability adjudicator)

CONTINUE STUDYING

Our alumni continue their studies at:

  • Boston University (Ph.D., religion)
  • Columbia University (law school)
  • Duke University (Masters, divinity)
  • Emory University (Ph.D., social ethics)
  • Florida State University (Ph.D., religious ethics)
  • George Washington University (Masters, educational technology)
  • Harvard University (Ph.D., history of art and architecture)
  • Seattle University (law school)
  • University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., art history)
  • University of Puget Sound (Masters, teaching, counseling)
  • University of Washington (medical school)