It has grown over the years from Professor Delton Scudder's one-person department to its current size of twelve faculty members. Our faculty are highly skilled, productive researchers and well regarded teachers. Many of our majors go on to graduate programs in religion, as well as medicine, law, and business. They enter into professions that welcome the breadth and depth of well trained students in the Humanities. Our MA students go into excellent PhD programs, train to be rabbis and ministers, and enter into other professions.
Religion is a varied, highly specialized, and broadly integrative field.
Our faculty members teach religions of East and West, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and others. Yet we have always been an unusually collaborative department. Because religion touches so many dimensions of being human, it invites interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary explorations. We network not only within our department, but also with other departments and schools. Several of us are interested in mysticism and meditation, most of us do work on gender issues and work with the Center for Women's Studies, three of us are associated with the Center for Jewish Studies, two with the Center for Latin American Studies, and two with the Center for Gerontological Studies.