Why is it that the ways of thinking and living that people call “religious” are often judged by outsiders to be potentially harmful forms of delusion, while those who adhere to those lifeways understand them instead as providing access to what scholar Robert Orsi calls “the really real”?

Why Beloit?

At Beloit College, the study of religion is integrated with Critical Identity Studies. Rather than isolating religion as though it were discrete from other aspects of human experience, we examine lifeways—religious and non-religious—as they intersect with normative and non-normative identities based on races, genders, sexualities, dis/abilities, nations, etc. We engage with elements of religious and secular thought and practice not so much as separate “belief systems,” but rather as critical and constructive resources both for questioning the things we take for granted about the world and for developing different ways of living and thinking.

Join us in exploring religion as it intersects with such topics as  racial and social justice, human embodiment, global affairs, and the very nature of reality. Visit Critical Identity Studies for further details.