The Philosophy and Religious Studies Program at SLCC provides students with introductory and specialized courses that engage the history, value and challenges of diverse ideas and worldviews through explorations of Eastern and Western philosophies and/or religions. Students in this program explore a wide range of belief sets and philosophical frameworks that have grounded humanity’s attempts to describe the ultimate nature of reality and the ultimate sources of worth, meaning, truth and purpose in life.

Program courses are based on the study of the ideas, writings, practices, histories, conceptual frameworks, and developments of secular and/or religious systems, individually and comparatively. The essentially interdisciplinary character of the program combined with the diversity of the methodological and pedagogical approaches used by the faculty create an effective educational model to introduce students to both the classical foundations of world cultures and to the recent developments arising out of them. Each course in the program proceeds from a commitment to strengthening the connections across disciplines and perspectives; developing methods of reasoning, problem solving, critical thinking, writing and speaking; and to cultivating attentiveness to words and practices, and the ways we make meaning and value in our lives.