When I first became involved in religious studies, I had no definite career plans. It actually started with an anthropology class. We covered a lot of different world religions, and my curiosity was piqued. I was raised by atheists, and I had never studied religion before in my life. Knowing the variety of beliefs that people held seemed like a useful life skill for me.
When I first became involved in religious studies, I had no definite career plans. It actually started with an anthropology class. We covered a lot of different world religions, and my curiosity was piqued. I was raised by atheists, and I had never studied religion before in my life. Knowing the variety of beliefs that people held seemed like a useful life skill for me.
As I studied religion more and more, I realized that I felt an absence in my life. Religious studies made me crave the experience of religious initiation. Basically every society in the world has some kind of religious initiation. In Judaism it is the Bar Mitzvah, and Catholicism it is confirmation, and among the Baptists it is ” well ” baptism. In more primitive societies, the rituals are more dramatic, but they function in the same way: to bring the convert into the community of religious beliefs.
I joined a few religion discussion groups and got to hear the opinions of different people about the nature of God and the meaning of life. For me, religious studies were very personal. It was all about spiritual exploration, and I was doing my fair share of that. I sat a lot of meditation, went to a few different services, and read all kinds of religious philosophy. Pretty soon, I had learned a great deal.
I had expected my religious studies to end neatly, but they didn’t really. I didn’t come out of it as a devoted member of a specific faith, although I did have some ideas that appealed to me more strongly than before. Nonetheless, it has given me a spiritual grounding. I feel much more of a sense of the meaning in life after studying religion than I did before. The world seems like a more ordered, structured place to me. For that, I’m thankful.
Anthropology
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Anthropology
Anthropology