The role of religion in relation to both structures of oppression and struggles of liberation constitutes the main focus of our work in Religion and Society. We study the role of religion in the personal, socio-political, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of those structure and struggles. We also include the intersection of religion and the human sciences. The strengths of this program are found in the variety of graduate students it gathers from every continent on the globe as well as the United States, who come from differing racial/ethnic/sexual groups, together with the diversity of interests, involvements, and expertise of its faculty. The faculty is diverse in academic training, coming from the fields of psychology, sociology, theology, religious education, and Christian ethics. Yet they share a focus on issues of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. They are united in their belief that theory should respond to human experience and that academic scholarship must address contemporary issues.
This diversity is evident in courses dealing with specific social concerns, such as religion and ecology, ethics of power, or gay and lesbian and other liberation theologies in world Christianity. These courses are taught alongside foundational courses in the Area’s various disciplines and utilize interdisciplinary methods including psychoanalytic, ethnographic, womanist, and cross cultural approaches. Others reflect faculty members’ distinctive expertise on contemporary issues such as new and ever more challenging ways of looking at justice, the religious impact of Latinas and Latinos in religion and theology, understandings of personal morality that place sociality, relationality, and responsibility at the center, and how the lives of many African-American women can be used as models to teach resilience, resistance, and hope. Others explore the dimensions of violence and trauma, the formation of the self and narcissism, urban religion, and the U.S. religious landscape. Many use postcolonial, feminist, womanist, mujerista, and cultural/social theories to look at religious acts of resistance and concern for justice around the globe.
