Courses · RELS 101
RELS 101: Gods, Spirits, and Myths
10 lessons and an exam, in order. Start with Lesson 1 and read upward. The course compares how human beings, from the earliest burials to the present, have related to gods, spirits, ancestors, and sacred stories. Every tradition is described the way its own members would recognize, then examined with the tools scholars use.
Texts: Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred; Pals, Nine Theories of Religion; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Concept of Religion"
Quiz: practice questions from the open lessons
- Lesson 1What religion is and how scholars study it fairly
- Lesson 2Origins: prehistoric religion, animism, and the religious mind
- Lesson 3 · Not posted yetSpirits, ancestors, and shamans: Indigenous and folk traditions
- Lesson 4 · Not posted yetMyth and ritual: how scholars read sacred stories and rites
- Lesson 5 · Not posted yetMany gods: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome
- Lesson 6 · Not posted yetHindu traditions: dharma, karma, and many paths
- Lesson 7 · Not posted yetBuddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions
- Lesson 8 · Not posted yetChina and Japan: Confucian, Daoist, and Shinto traditions
- Lesson 9 · Not posted yetOne God, three traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam compared
- Lesson 10 · Not posted yetNew religious movements, high-control groups, and secularization
- Exam · Not posted yetRELS 101 Exam
What you will be able to do
- Define religion three ways (by belief, by social function, by family resemblance) and say what each definition includes and leaves out.
- Describe a tradition fairly: give an insider's account its own members would accept before offering an outsider's analysis.
- Use the scholar's toolkit: emic and etic, methodological agnosticism, Ninian Smart's seven dimensions, and the classic theories of myth and ritual.
- Compare without flattening: set two traditions side by side on one dimension (ritual, ethics, or the afterlife, for example) and name both the likenesses and the real differences.
- Read the evidence: tell what archaeology, texts, and fieldwork can and cannot show about religious life, especially for the distant past.
- Recognize control: tell the difference between a demanding religious community and a group that uses psychological pressure to control its members.
Where this course leads
RELS 101 is step one of a master's-level track in the study of religion. Graduate programs in religious studies usually expect four things that this course begins: a working command of theory and method (the debates over definition and insider and outsider views that open Lesson 1), breadth across several traditions (Lessons 5 to 10), primary sources read in translation and, later, in their original languages, and a habit of fair comparison that can survive peer review. Each lesson lists its sources so you can follow any thread into the scholarly literature.
Related courses on this site: PHIL 101 asks whether religious claims are true, the philosophy of religion; this course asks what religions are and how they work. SOC 101 introduces Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, two founders whose ideas about religion return here.
Lessons open one at a time. Also on this site: PHIL 101: Introduction to Philosophy
