The Committee on the Study of Religion is unique among Harvard’s degree granting committees: it is an inter-faculty committee that supports both an undergraduate concentration and a Ph.D. program. The members of the Standing Committee are drawn from nine FAS departments (English, Comparative Literature, Romance Languages, Classics, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and African and African American Studies) and the Harvard Divinity School (HDS). Our approach to the study of religion is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing together faculty and students who approach the field from multiple perspectives, including history, literature, ethnography, anthropology, and philosophy.
Harvard’s concern with religion is as old as the college itself, which its founders hoped would advance learning so as not “to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches” in succeeding generations. The oldest professorship at Harvard is the Hollis Professor of Divinity, dating from 1721; the first graduate program for ministers was begun in 1811; and the Harvard Divinity School was founded in 1816. The tradition of professional ministerial education continues in the Divinity School through the M.Div. degree, and other graduate degree programs, including the M.TS. and the Masters of Religion and Public Life, have been developed at the school.
In the Yard, the Committee on the Study of Religion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences administers two programs of study in religion, the more recent of which is the undergraduate concentration in “the Comparative Study of Religion,” established by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1974. The older program for the Ph.D. in the Study of Religion dates to 1934, when Ph.D. studies in “the History and Philosophy of Religion” were initiated. Harvard’s distinguished record of scholarship in the study of religion in the arts and sciences context goes back still farther. One need only mention the names of William James, the great scholar of psychological and philosophical approaches to religion; George Foot Moore, the eminent Semiticist and first renowned student of the religions of the world at Harvard; Arthur Darby, a scholar of the study of Greco-Roman and Hellenistic religion and early Christianity; and Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), one of the foremost historians of world religion. The founding of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard in 1960, and the tenure of Smith as the second director (1964-1974) were milestones in religious studies at Harvard. The Center has brought to Cambridge many scholars from around the world over the past sixty-five years. It remains a major resource for students interested in comparative studies, both at the graduate and at the undergraduate level.