The Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality explores and examines the religious and spiritual phenomena of human life, experience, culture, and history.  As one major field in contemporary cultural studies, studies of religious and spiritual phenomena require many disciplinary approaches and methods.  The Faculty of the Department, as a result, examines the multi-dimensional cultural realities of religions, spiritualities, and religious and spiritual phenomena more broadly from diverse disciplinary perspectives.  The current Faculty employs and relies upon a wide range of methods to study the many dimensions of religious and spiritual phenomena: aesthetic criticism; anthropology; archaeology; critical race theory; cultural analysis; demographic analysis; economics; ethnography; geography; hermeneutics; ideology critique; linguistic analysis; literary studies; phenomenology; philology; philosophy; political science; psychology; rhetorical analysis; sociology; textual criticism; history; theology; women’s and gender studies; among other methods as well.  When possible, colleagues from other academic departments (as two examples, African and African American Studies and Philosophy) contribute their own methodological expertise to studies of religious and spiritual phenomena by teaching occasional courses for the Department.

Jeff B. Pool, Ph.D. (University of Chicago)
Chairperson, Department for the Studies of Religions and Spirituality
Eli Lilly Chair in Religion and Culture
Professor of Religion

Duane A. Smith, Ph.D. (Harvard University)
Eli Lilly Chair in Religion
Associate Professor of Religion

Mary-Reginald Anibueze, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame)
Assistant Professor of Religion and African and African American Studies