Discover your best self in relation to others as you ask essential questions, investigate ethics and morality, study world religions, and contemplate what it means to be human in a changing world.
The Department of Religion, Ethics and Philosophy creates space to study life’s formative questions and explore the world’s formative traditions. You’ll discover the diversity of systems and institutions that have oriented human efforts to live well.
Course offerings are distinctive and interdisciplinary. Each course invites students into questions of meaning, value and purpose and celebrates creativity and intellectual curiosity. Our curriculum cultivates a student’s capacity for cross-cultural engagement and responsible participation in community — at the Academy and in their wider world.
What we want to try to do with students in their time here is give them opportunities to engage in meaningful introspection, on one level — who am I, who do I want to become — and on another level we want to give them tools to engage with their world.
Tom Simpson, chair of the Department of Religion, Ethics & Philosophy
Explore Courses
Discover your best self in relation to others as you ask essential questions, investigate ethics and morality, study world religions and more.
Phillips Church
A spiritual hub of the Academy, welcoming and serving our community’s diverse religious traditions and beliefs.
Featured Courses
REL270
Faith and Doubt
Invites you to explore, through fiction and personal narrative, the depth and complexity of religious experience in its many forms from traditional belief through skepticism.
REL555
Introduction to Psychology
Students in this course study a range of explanations for human thought, behavior and emotion.
REL265
Religion and Popular Culture
Images, ideas, stereotypes and symbol systems of religion surround us in popular culture, whether in movies, television shows, sports, fashion, the internet, music or literature.