to teach about the world's religions traditions, introducing students to the thoughts, beliefs, institutions, symbolic expressions, worship, and social and moral implications of these traditions, and to illuminate their interaction with other social and cultural forms, including other religious traditions;
to introduce students to the various methods employed in religious studies: historical, philosophical and theological, sociological and psychological, textual, hermeneutical and aesthetic, and comparative;
to provide a place for addressing big questions of value, meaning, and human cares and for assessing the ways these are addressed in religious communities; and
to encourage students to think about religious ways of life tolerantly, sympathetically, and yet critically.
