“Religious Myths and Rituals,” a course I teach once a year, is a lower division undergraduate course designed to introduce students to the academic study of religion. Its purpose is to acquaint students with the wide range of scholarly views regarding the meanings, origins, and functions of religion, the mythic and ritual components of religion, the widespread presence of religious symbols, the metaphoric character of religious language, diverse crosscultural images of transcendence, sacrality, and the like. In order to introduce the theoretical materials or to test or illuminate them, we focus on the specific religious expressions of American Indian and African tribal societies. Although examples from other religions are cited in the course of class lectures, these two tribal cultural settings serve as our primary reference points for understanding the phenomenon of religion.

On the course syllabus and early in the quarter, I articulate the following questions as a way of describing the task of the course: What is religion? What are the origins and functions of religion? What can we learn about myths and mythologies and the functions they have in human experience? Why do rituals arise in human behavior? (How do they take shape and what are they for?) Do any of the myths and rituals of traditional, tribal religions have any bearing on contemporary American life? How might we discern the meaning of religious symbols? What are some of the predominant myths and rituals that both reflect and affect our own lives as individuals or as a people (as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists—as students, Americans, Westerners, as women or men)?