Focus of this section
Theology and religious studies uses a wide range of approaches: philosophy and history; languages and texts; sociology, anthropology, and psychology. These are applied to religion broadly conceived as experience and representation of the divine, the sacred, the holy or god(s). We study and interpret religious institutions and movements, ritual and practice, texts, laws, beliefs, worldviews, ethics, symbols, material objects, and spaces. We are concerned with historical and present-day religions and traditions, and with spiritualities and sacralised forms of commitment, together with their expression in literature, visual art, and music. Varieties of secularism, humanism, agnosticism and atheism, and the theological and religious questions raised by other disciplines, for example cosmology and medicine, are also included in the field of study.
Section chair
Professor Nicholas de Lange FBA
Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Cambridge