This course investigates why people have decided to embrace different beliefs across time and space. Using historical methods, students analyze how religious ideas and practices have emerged, developed, and interacted with politics, society, and culture. The course takes a global perspective, with balanced attention to traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, as well as nontheistic and oral traditions. The course also considers interactions of different religious ideas, and of religion with interactions of rational ideas such as Greek philosophy, the enlightenment, and ideas of science. It explores the variety of people's responses to such encounters: resistance, conversion, adaptation within a tradition, and incorporating elements into new hybrid systems. A central objective is to cultivate religious literacy, to enable students to make sense of humans' embrace of diverse beliefs within historical contexts and to assess religion's enduring role as a part of human experience and global exchange.
