Majors & Minors

Religion

Southwestern’s Religion program introduces students to a variety of global religious traditions, experiences and expressions, with the goal of creating an empathetic understanding of differences.

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Laura Hobgood

Laura Hobgood

Professor of Religion & Chair

Laura Hobgood

Laura Hobgood

Professor of Religion & Chair

Religion
Religion (Credit: Southwestern University)

As an academic discipline, religious studies prepares students to better understand, compare, interpret, and analyze the diverse array of human expression known as “religious.” A guiding assumption in religious studies is that religion can and should be subjected to the types of critical analyses that are applied to other areas of the human social world. Religious studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field that utilizes the critical theories and tools from many other academic fields, such as: philosophy, art, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, language studies, literature, politics, economics, cultural studies, gender studies and ethnic studies.



AFTER SOUTHWESTERN

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Recent alumna will pursue a dual degree master’s program at world-renowned institutions.

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Courtney King ’20

A Future CEO

With her sights set on running her own business one day, Courtney King ’20 shares that making the world a better place is at the heart of all her endeavors.

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Jackson Bird ’12

Jackson Bird ’12

Distinguished Young Alumnus

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Religion News

Laura Hobgood

Professor of Religion Laura Hobgood featured in The Atlantic

The article references her book A Dog’s History of the World.

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Eating Animals Panel

Eating Animals: Bringing Religious Perspectives to the Table

An interactive panel discussion exploring the religious intersection of the treatment of animals and our food choices.

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Mister Squinty

Dogs Are Man’s Best Friend, but Cats Are a Pirate’s First Mate

Meet Southwestern University’s Cat Partners club and its furry, feline family.

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Religion Events

Frederic Edwin Church, Tree Fern, Jamaica, 1865, brush and oil paint, graphite on cream paperboard (Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

“Picturing Botanical Imperialism in the Americas”

Picturing Botanical Imperialism in the Americas

Maggie Cao
Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina

Lecture and Q&A sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History

Summary: The circulation of plants has long been tied to considerations of climate. Today climate change endangers many native species while exacerbating the negative impact of invasives. This talk explores artists’ engagements with plants in the context of imperialism past and present. The most famous landscape painter of the nineteenth-century US, Frederic Edwin Church, was a master of painting the flora of the American tropics. This talk will explore his paintings of Jamaica and the ways they engaged with botanical understandings of colonialism and emancipation. The legacy of Church’s nineteenth-century botanical imagery will be examined through contemporary artist Maria Thereza Alves’s ongoing Seeds of Changeproject, in which unearthed seeds from historic ballast sites are used to grow gardens. These gardens generated from waste—the dumped rocks, earth, and sand that once balanced merchant vessels—invert the history of colonialism told by the hothouse displays and herbarium collections of the past.

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