As an academic field, the study of religion focuses on a set of problems, questions, and frames for intellectual attention about how human beings inhabit their social and cultural worlds in relation to what they conceive as more-than-human powers. World religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, provide a rich set of data through which to explore such issues. But religion is bigger than that, for as an emergent phenomenon, religion appertains to the fullness of the human world. Religion emerges from literature, history, social organization, imagination, emotions, culture, and even the physical body itself. For this reason, the hallmark of UC San Diego's Program for the Study of Religion is its interdisciplinary and interdepartmental structure. There is no discipline in the humanities or social sciences that does not provide its own rigorous and edifying window onto the phenomena of religion. Faculty from anthropology, communication, ethnic studies, history, Jewish studies, literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, and visual arts provide students with the opportunity to examine religious artifacts, practices, performances, texts, institutions, and communities within a particular cultural and historical context and in the context of comparable manifestations within the general history of religions. Because academic approaches to religion are so diverse, the program is committed to giving its students the widest practicable latitude to develop their own program of learning within the field. A concentration in the Study of Religion aims at helping students to gather the information, the analytic tools, as well as the critical acumen needed to think clearly and deeply about the place of religion in their own lives and the lives of their fellow human beings. Additionally, the program seeks to develop students appreciation of the difficulties and possibilities inherent in undertaking a critical, disciplined, cross-cultural study of religion, this includes making sure that students recognize the difference between confessional and scholarly discourses on religion. The program judges its success by whether its students gain a contextual understanding of the religious phenomena they investigate, and whether they are able to usefully interrogate their source materials in order to develop analytical skills in the practice of interpretation, oral discussion, and writing.
