Religion Department

Studying religion at Luther equips you to be a global citizen in a diverse and changing world. The academic study of religion helps you become competent in religious literacy. It also provides analytical tools for understanding how religion creates, maintains, and challenges social, political, and economic structures and institutions. While taking religion courses, you’ll wrestle with some of life’s biggest questions and examine religion’s complex role in society throughout history.

The study of religion at Luther is not limited to the classroom. Study abroad courses and field trips provide a variety of experiences, such as having tea with a Zen master in a mountain temple in Japan, joining Muslims for Friday prayer in Copenhagen, meeting survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, talking to liberation theologians in Latin America, and participating in interreligious engagement in South Africa. Internships provide further opportunities to learn in specific contexts and explore possible careers.

When studying religion at Luther, you’ll:

• Map religions as cultural constructions shaped by historical, social, and political dynamics
• Analyze the development and ongoing interpretation of foundational religious narratives in the form of literary or non-literary texts
• Develop critical skills to examine the ongoing history of particular religious traditions or subtraditions
• Integrate knowledge about religious communities and worldviews with contemporary issues of public concern
• Assess how religious communities, worldviews, and practices are impacted by encounters with other communities, worldviews, and practices
• Engage with the diversity within and among religious traditions
• Be able to identify different approaches that scholars use to study religious communities
• Analyze how religion relates to a sense of self, identity and social location