Religions make crucial contributions to the human worlds in which we live. They affect our pasts and presents, ideas and convictions, emotions and desires, actions and values, associations and antagonisms, artistic, literary, and musical creations. Courses in religious studies aim to provide students with knowledge and skills that will enable them to understand religions and their contributions, both positive and negative, and so to live intelligently and humanely. They do not presume any religious commitment on the part of the student, nor do they endorse, promote, or condemn any particular religion, set of religions, or religion in general. Instead, they examine religions as objects of academic inquiry, and they use a variety of methods to do so, humanistic, social scientific, at times even natural scientific.