Religion has been the source of great human achievement and of much cultural conflict. The discipline of Religious Studies seeks to understand why and how this is the case. To this end, in courses that are taught from a variety of perspectives and disciplines (including religious studies proper, philosophy, anthropology, history, literary studies, and sociology), Religious Studies offers students an opportunity to explore a range of meaning-making systems?their beliefs, practices, texts, history, and social-cultural functions. In learning how seemingly foreign systems of meaning make sense to those who hold them, students are asked to make explicit their own assumptions about their religious beliefs, to look at their assumptions from the point of view of someone who does not share them, and thus to deepen their understanding of how their beliefs compare with the beliefs of others in relation to the course of human civilization.