7 courses with the subject REL, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
REL 111World Religions4
meets the Peace Core Humanities requirement This course introduces students to the world’s great religions (Indigenous religions, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, the Religion of Ancient Israel, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) so that they will discover what all religions share in common (and how vastly different they are), how each religion seeks to provide guidance in solving fundamental human problems, offers a wonderful window onto a culture’s great art, science, medicine, cuisine, literature, architecture, and music, both shapes a culture and is shaped by it, helps a culture articulate its values, morals and aspirations, helps us to understand ourselves, provides people orientation to life and a map of reality, and binds people together. Students will read primary as well as secondary texts.
meets the Peace Core Humanities requirement This course helps students understand how religion has shaped American culture and how American culture has shaped religion. It will focus on the diversity of religion in America and compare movements and ideas. It will also inquire about whether there are unifying elements in American religion that bind Americans together as a people. A significant focus of this course is on five vital impulses that perennially shape American religion: the experimentalist, millennialist, utopian, modernist and traditionalist impulses. The course will concentrate on the meaning of America as a series of colonial religious experiments, the religious motivations for major movements of social reform, alternative religious movements that favor communal experiments or utopian vision, the occult, Eastern religions, movements that helped Americans accommodate religious beliefs to modern world views, and the reactionary movements that opposed cultural accommodation.
meets the Peace Core Humanities requirement This course invites students to a contemporary, cross-cultural study of the world’s great mythologies as a search for values and identity. Students will explore the common 186 | 2026-27 William Peace University Academic Catalog
A course whose content may vary from term to term according to the needs of the academic department, student demand or the interests of the faculty member.
A course of study addressing a specific topic or problem of interest to a student, designed collaboratively by the student and faculty member(s), and resulting in a paper, report, critiqued performance or production, or other assessable evidence of value added to the student’s educational experience. A contract of expectations by the student and by the supervising faculty member(s) must be approved by the advisor and the Vice President for Academic Affairs prior to registration. No more than eight (8) semester hours toward the baccalaureate degree can consist of directed study credit. 187 | 2026-27 William Peace University Academic Catalog
