At the beginning of the twenty-first century, religion plays a central role in virtually every aspect of human society around the globe. The Religion department's curriculum offers students the opportunity to explore the histories, texts, and practices of many of the world's religious communities and to consider both the profound ways in which religion has worked historically and how it continues to inform and affect the cultural, political, and ethical debates of the current moment. In addition, our curriculum invites students to reflect on the challenging theoretical questions that are generated by the category religion itself, an abstract category that has its own complicated history. The academic study of religion is self-consciously interdisciplinary, drawing upon the methods and insights of literary studies, historiography, social analysis, and cultural comparison. Moreover, the study of religion reminds us that religious identities demand sustained critical analysis, intersecting complexly as they do with race, class, gender, and ethnicity, among other categories of affiliation and identification. In its teaching, research projects, and public programming, the Religion department promotes engaged intellectual inquiry into the rich diversity of religious institutions, rituals, ideas, and communities both past and present.<br><br>The Departments of Religion at Barnard and Columbia marshal an array of academic approaches to the study of religion, representing the depth and diversity of the world's religious traditions, past and present. The category of religion-along with key related terms like belief, spirituality, mystical experience, and ritual-is historically and culturally contingent, many of our courses interrogate these terms and the conditions of their construction. Yet we are committed to engaging religion, which persists so strongly in common usage and public debate, and is so hard to capture in any related domain or theoretical system.