Understand Every Religion on Earth

If you've ever found yourself watching the news, reading a novel, or walking through a foreign city — and realized you didn't have the tools to make sense of what you were seeing religiously — you're exactly the person I built this course for.

Maybe you grew up inside one tradition and know it well, but feel embarrassingly uncertain the moment the conversation turns to Islam, or Buddhism, or the indigenous traditions of the Americas. Maybe you grew up with no religious background at all and find the entire subject opaque. Maybe you took a religion course decades ago and remember very little beyond a few names and dates. Whatever brought you here, I want you to know: the gap you feel is not a personal failing. It's a gap in how we educate people. And it's entirely closeable.

What I have designed here is the course I wish every thoughtful adult could take — rigorous in the way a good university survey should be rigorous, but built for independent learners who don't have the luxury of a semester-long seminar. We begin where every honest course of this kind must begin: with method. Before we look at a single religion, we establish how scholars study religion, what distinguishes a historical claim from a theological one, and what it means to approach an unfamiliar tradition fairly. Those tools will serve you for the rest of the course — and for the rest of your life.

From there, we move through the full sweep of human religious history. We spend real time with the archaeological record of prehistoric belief — the Neanderthal burials, the cave paintings at Lascaux, the deep origins of shamanism and ancestor veneration — because you cannot understand where religion is going if you don't understand where it came from. We examine the gods of the ancient world: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, Greece, Rome. We linger over the Axial Age, that remarkable period when Confucius, the Hebrew prophets, Zoroaster, and the composers of the Upanishads were all, independently, reimagining the sacred at roughly the same moment in history. And then, unit by unit, we work through the living traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, the Bahá'í Faith, African traditional religions, and the syncretic traditions of the diaspora.

I won't pretend this is light reading. The academic vocabulary matters — eschatology, syncretism, orthopraxy, the numinous — and I use it, because imprecise language produces imprecise thinking. But I also unpack every term before I expect you to use it, and I promise you that by the end, you will wield this vocabulary naturally. More than that: you will be the person in the room who actually understands what's being talked about when religion comes up — historically, theologically, comparatively. That is the transformation this course delivers.

If you're ready to do the work — to read carefully, think critically, and hold your assumptions up to the light — then I'm genuinely glad you're here. Let's begin.