Religious Studies

Defining major concepts: African, indigenous, religions, development. Indigenous beliefs and practices, concepts of development. Attitudes towards African Indigenous Religions, knowledge systems and their roles in modern concepts of development. Impact and problems. Emerging trends: leadership systems e.g. priest and priestesses, Nkכsuoכhene, chiefs, queen-mothers and other traditional leaders and local government in relation to community development.

This course introduces students to the dynamic, diverse, often colorful, and surprising world of global religions. It addresses religious traditions that have a huge influence on the world as we know it: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, but also local traditions in, e.g., Sub-Sahara Africa. The course integrates two components or perspectives: an ideational perspective that concerns religious beliefs and doctrines, and a practical “lived religions” perspective that concerns religious acts and rituals. Both components are approached from a transnational perspective that investigates how religions develop, and interact with each other and with other cultural phenomena and political institutions on a global scale.

The course examines the relations between Europe’s different religious groups – the various Christian denominations chiefly, but also Christians and Jews – in the centuries between the Reformation and the French Revolution. With the Reformation, a once-united western Christendom split into hostile, warring camps. Despite the ideals of toleration and religious freedom championed by some thinkers, actual social relations between the groups remained intensely problematic to the very end of the early modern period.