Engaging Religions: An Introduction to Religion and Global Affairs

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In a religiously diverse and vastly troubled world, how do religious traditions motivate believers to work toward the common good? "Engaging Religions," the course title, refers to three things we will examine. First, it describes how religions are intrinsically engaging: they draw in adherents by fulfilling their material, intellectual, and spiritual needs. Second, it specifies what various secular institutions like governments and development organizations must do in pursuing the common good across our planet -- most of whose inhabitants are religious. Finally, it characterizes our work in this class: exploring how various religious traditions conceptualize and work toward the common good in a global context. We will read historians, social scientists, philosophers, and critical theorists on how to analyze and interpret the role of religion in contemporary life, while examining case studies of how religious practices, beliefs, and identities intersect with issues in global affairs such as inequality, armed conflict, and climate change. In doing so, we will engage how religious traditions from the East and West -- from Asian and Abrahamic "world" religions, to a variety of indigenous "local" religions -- complicate or complement modern Catholicism's emphasis on Integral Human Development.