Harvard University Launches Online Course To Promote Religious Literacy

In order to address what she calls “widespread illiteracy about religion that spans the globe,” Diane Moore, director of Harvard Divinity School’s Religious Literacy Project and five other religion professors from Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School and Wellesley College in the USA are launching a free, online series on world religions, open to the public. The courses are being offered via an online learning platform, which Harvard University launched with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moore is teaching the first course in the series on “Religious Literacy: Traditions and Scriptures”. The next five will dive into specific faiths, covering Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism. Moore suggests that religious literacy should include an understanding that religious traditions are “internally diverse,” ever-evolving, and play complex roles in people’s lives. To that end, the course aims to offer participants an understanding of the history and interpretations of religious texts and why some were designated as “sacred.”
(Extracted from huffingtonpost.com)