Department of Comparative Religion & Social Harmony

Welcome to Department of Comparative Religion & Social Harmony

The courses of Comparative Religion & Social Harmony, FAC will enable the students to acquire certain degree of knowledge in the religions and social harmony in under the humanities perspective and to interpret the phenomenon of major world’ religious traditions. This course enhances the students’ knowledge to cop-up with the multi religious exposures and integrate citizenship education in a pluralistic society and the world. Promote the understanding how religions relates to other human domains and studying religions with historic, critical, philosophical and contemporary cultural trends in the multicultural Sri Lankan context and the world. Eventually students will develop critical thinking, effective communication and research skill in the study.

Objective

• To provide essential knowledge of the historical emergence, cultural contexts, scriptural and oral traditions, teachings, practices, and contemporary expressions of the major world’s religious traditions.
• To compare the components forms of world religious life, including ritual, myth, doctrine, philosophy, ethics, and material culture.
• To relate the religious experience and knowledge, with gender, ethnicity, social organizations, politics, economics, and science; and how religions are used both to support them and to criticize social structures and institutions.
  To score competence in the interdisciplinary, comparative approach to the study of religion. This employs the tools and perspectives of such disciplines as anthropology, Sociology, philosophy, theology, ethics, history, psychology, and literary theory.
• To demonstrate the skills of critical reading, listening, and reasoning that foster conversation and enrich civil and academic discourse about religion.
• To manage the research skills and methods appropriate to the contemporary study of religion, including library and Internet research.

Intended Learning Outcomes

After completion of the courses in Comparative Religion & Social Harmony, students will be able to :

• relate the historical and cultural sources of religious studies and describe the basic beliefs and practices of world religious traditions,
• interpret the concepts of ritual, myth, doctrine, ethics, philosophy, and religious culture by describing and comparing examples of each.
• demonstrate the conceptual ideas of religions in the religious texts (including primary texts) from the perspective of a disciplinary approach.
• analyze the main theme of religions and its methodologies.
  prepare a research project that demonstrates it through the facility of traditional methods and electronic devices.
• apply the religious studies, resources and usage of appropriate scholarlystyle and citation formats.