Harvard’s Religious Literacy Project

Teaching a world religions course? Harvard Divinity School’s Literacy Project has some excellent resources including profiles of the five major world religions.

Each profile includes sub-topics with easy to read summaries. These sub topics cover the important periods in the religion’s development and the issues that it faces today.

The summaries are different than those at the BBC site for World Religion. The Literacy Project concentrates on the religion’s internal diversity and on the way the religion has changed and evolved over time.

In addition, you can read short explanations about the different ways we think about religion. Some of the topics the editors address include “defintions of religious literacy,” “religious influences embedded in cultures,” and  “the internal diversity of religion.”

Students might enjoy reading some of these explanantions at the begining a religions course.