Curriculum Map

Comparative Religions

What is wrong with the human condition, and what would fix it? Each great tradition asks a version of this question and gives a genuinely different answer. Ten units of religious literacy — taught about, never devotionally: the full range of positions declared before any tradition makes its case, the traditions in their own terms, and the civic skill of understanding neighbors you may disagree with.

10 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

The Literacy We Lost

In the days after September 11, 2001, a Sikh American named Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered outside the gas station he owned in Mesa, Arizona — killed by a man who later told police he wanted to 'kill some ragheads' in retaliation for the attacks. Sodhi was not Muslim. He was not Arab. He wore a turban and a beard as an article of his Sikh faith, a tradition with no connection to the attackers beyond the killer's own confusion. His death opens a course about religious literacy: not tolerance, not devotion, but the civic skill of knowing what you are looking at.

2-3 weeks

Springs in the Levant

Eleven thousand years ago, on a hilltop in what is now southeastern Turkey, people who had not yet invented agriculture quarried, carved, and raised stone pillars taller than a person, arranged in circles, decorated with animals no one asked them to depict. Göbekli Tepe complicates a story civilization has told about itself for centuries — that farming came first and religion followed. This unit traces where gods, scripture, and doubt about both were born in the same ancient neighborhood.

2-3 weeks

A Brief History of Disbelief

Before this course describes a single tradition in depth, it puts the full range of positions on the table — including the positions that answer 'none of the above.' Serious inquiry declares its priors before it begins, and a course about religion owes its students the same discipline: here is nonbelief, described in terms its own thoughtful adherents would recognize, its internal debates aired fairly, its persecution history and its ethical frameworks taken seriously. Following Jonathan Miller's documentary arc from Epicurus through Spinoza's excommunication, Hume's epistemological caution, Darwin's documented reluctance, to the New Atheists and their critics, this unit distinguishes atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism, and irreligion as genuinely different positions, not synonyms — and states the course's constitutional guardrail in its hardest application first, so every unit that follows can be held to it.

2-3 weeks

Judaism: Exile and Return

In 586 BCE, Babylonian armies destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and deported much of Judah's population to Babylon. The tradition that emerged from that catastrophe did not fold. It rebuilt itself around covenant, text, and argument — building a portable homeland out of Torah and Talmud that could travel wherever its people were forced to go. This unit follows Judaism's answer to exile: not a lost golden age to mourn, but a sustained, adaptive condition to live inside.

2-3 weeks

Christianity: Sin and Salvation

A small apocalyptic Jewish movement centered on an executed rabbi from Galilee became, within four centuries, the official religion of the Roman Empire, and within twenty, the largest religious tradition on Earth — its demographic center now in Lagos and São Paulo, not Rome. This unit traces Christianity's historical development, its central grace-and-works argument, and the debates that still divide roughly two billion adherents today.

2-3 weeks

Islam: Pride and Submission

Islām means submission — not passive resignation, but the deliberate act of aligning one's whole life to the will of God. This unit studies the Quran as recited revelation, the Five Pillars as lived structure, shariah as a centuries-deep jurisprudential tradition rather than a single fixed code, and the historical dispute that split the early Muslim community into Sunni and Shia branches still very much alive today.

2-3 weeks

Hinduism: Cycle and Release

Hinduism diagnoses the human problem as samsara — the beginningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, driven by karma and bound by ignorance of the self's true nature — and prescribes moksha, liberation from that cycle, reachable by more than one path. This unit studies Hinduism as a family of related traditions unified by shared texts and concepts more than by a single creed, traces the caste system's classical framework alongside its lived history and its own internal reformist critique, and names two live debates — one philosophical, one political — that run through Hindu thought today.

2-3 weeks

Buddhism: Suffering and Awakening

Buddhism diagnoses the human problem as dukkha — suffering, or a deeper unsatisfactoriness woven into conditioned existence itself — and prescribes awakening, reached by walking the Eightfold Path, structured by the Four Noble Truths. This is the unit where the category 'religion' itself starts to strain: Buddhism, in its core teaching, holds no creator god, making James's functional definition from Unit 1 the tool that keeps the tradition inside this course's comparative frame without distortion. This unit traces the three major branches, and studies mindfulness's high-profile secular migration into Western wellness culture as a live, contested question about what travels and what gets left behind.

2-3 weeks

Harmony, the Way, and Kami

This unit studies Confucian harmony and filial piety, Daoist wu-wei and the Dao, Shinto kami and ritual practice without founder or fixed creed, and Indigenous land-based lifeways where spiritual, ecological, and social life are not divided into separate spheres at all. This is the unit where the category 'religion' itself is shown to be a historically Western, post-Enlightenment analytical instrument with real limits — not a universal container every human tradition fits inside the same way.

2-3 weeks

God on the Battlefield

This closing unit compares just-war traditions across religions — Christian just war theory, Islamic jurisprudential concepts of jihad, Hindu dharma-yuddha as dramatized in the Bhagavad Gita, and the Sikh sant-sipahi ideal forged under Mughal persecution — then turns to civil religion: how nations deploy sacred language and ritual for cohesion regardless of individual belief. Lincoln's Second Inaugural anchors civil religion's most sophisticated form; the post-9/11 'crusade' remark anchors its riskiest. This is the course's payoff unit: nine units of religious literacy become the tool for detecting sacred-language framing in political speech, in real time.

2-3 weeks

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.