CEU's teaching and research on religion combines historical scholarship with the contemporary concerns that arise from the University’s public mission. Like its international environments, the university questions the conviction that modernity is of necessity correlative with the disenchantment of the world and the disappearance of religion. Whether enmeshed in politics or claiming a cultural realm of its own, religion is going to remain part of our future. CRS encourages its students and faculty to rethink the impact of religious phenomena in the past and present, whether these phenomena are understood as individual sentiments, collective representations, scriptural and theological systems of meaning, social institutions, or political forces.
The study of religion, therefore, appears of interest not only to specialists in the field, but is a matter of general public interest. The study of religious traditions helps in the clarification of notions of tradition overall. The intellectual history of religion is an important chapter in the intellectual history of humanity. And a variety of mythological and ideological aspects of religion are of invaluable use in illuminating the study of public mythologies and ideologies, which they represent in accentuated and sometimes almost paradigmatic form.
It therefore appears to us that the best approach to the study of religion at the CEU starts from the interplay between religion and other social and historical phenomena. It is also clear, however, that this in itself would be insufficient to give an adequate impression of the historical and social amplitude of religion, and that religious studies at the CEU need an institutional form which is not only derivative of disciplines with which it interfaces and which it crosses, but also one which brings to bear a considerable amount of expertise in the disciplines of the history of religions and comparative religion as such. The study of religion is a self-contained discipline in the humanities and social sciences, and has distinctive paradigmatic elements, some deriving from historical and philological studies, and some from anthropological and sociological studies, which need to be fully taken on board. In the present format, the thematic purview of the Center for Religious Studies takes up principally the three monotheistic religions, but would include civil religions as well (be they American or Roman). Other religions are brought in the context of more general methodological, conceptual and comparative discussions.