Photos and quotes from Genesis participants discussing their experience taking the course "World Religions: Encountering Diversity".
World Religions:
Encountering Diversity
Genesis courses are hands-on seminars for students like you. Together with your classmates and our knowledgeable faculty, we will create an enjoyable learning experience that is both challenging and rewarding, without the pressure of tests or grades. The “World Religions” course uses the inquiry of different religions to both to enrich our understanding of "others" and to discover what this can teach us about ourselves. Your curiosity, questions, and assumptions are the starting points for our learning.
Explore
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Explore and challenge the ways the religious traditions of the world draw boundaries to define individuals, their relationships and communities, and the divine;
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Reflect on how learning about a wide variety of traditions can help you learn more about your own religious and spiritual life;
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Look at the complexities of religious traditions and their practitioners and how religion has the potential to lead to enormous good or enormous evil and violence;
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Explore how religious diversity is negotiated in the United States and other parts of the globe.
Encounter
Visit religious centers, experience worship services, and meet with practitioners of different religions:
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Take a tour of Mayyim Hayyim Living Waters Community Mikveh;
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Visit the historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church and experience a Sunday morning service;
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Visit the Chinmaya Mission of Boston (a Hindu temple and learning center);
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Travel to the Islamic Society of Boston’s mosque;
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Meet a Wiccan priestess and participate in an earth-centered ritual;
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Visit the Shim Gwang Sa, The Mind Light Buddhist Temple, where Shim Gum Do - Zen Mind Sword Path – is practiced;
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Interact with a graduate student studying Sufi music and poetry;
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Meet Father Walter Cuenin, the Roman Catholic Chaplain at Brandeis University, and talk about Catholic-Jewish relations.
Engage
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Make connections between other religions to Judaism and to your personal views on issues of the divine, ritual, celebration, gender in religion, and more;
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Research organizations and people who represent a specific religious tradition’s teachings on social responsibility;
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Enact a case study built on the political and religious issues around the building of a new mosque in Boston.
* Note that courses change year to year and not all of these highlights may happen this summer