c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-As Khyati Joshi, 25, walks to class at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she flinches when she hears a siren.”I never know when a bomb will explode,”she said.

But Joshi refuses to leave.”Being in Israel gets inside you,”she said.”You become involved in things. As I see the struggle that goes on here, I realize that all you have is faith.” A Hindu and native of India, Joshi moved to Atlanta at age 2. She majored in religious studies at Emory University there, studying Judaism and the Holocaust. Today she is continuing her schooling in Israel, where she has studied at Yad Vashem, a Jerusalem museum and memorial to Holocaust victims.”My exploration of Judaism helped me better understand Hinduism,”she said.”It forced me to see my own faith more clearly. It helped me establish my identity.” Joshi is among a growing number of college students who are opting to major in religious studies rather than in such traditional fare as business and science. The trend, already striking, may well become larger in coming decades as an influx of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other religious minorities further diversifies the U.S. population away from its Judeo-Christian roots.

In the 1994-95 academic year, more than 44,000 freshmen at 427 U.S. colleges and universities declared religion or theology their major, according to a study published by the American Council on Education and the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute.

Likewise, a 1995 study of 251 colleges, by the Association of the Chairs of the Departments of Religion, cited a 36 percent increase in enrollment of undergraduate religion majors over the preceding five years.

Along with the new interest in religion has come an evolution in curricula.

At one time, religion departments typically taught Christianity from a Protestant perspective, said Hans Hillerbrand, chairman of the religion department at Duke University in Durham, N.C.”Now,”he said,”there is a richness of offerings. … We try to combine serious academic work with questions that the students are concerned about,”such as those pertaining to the meaning or priorities of life and the relationship of individuals to the community.

Such courses as religion and law, religion and ethics, religion and medicine, religion and psychology and religion and film”try to probe the religious and ethical question of human existence,”he said.

Added Joshi,”It used to be that if you took religion classes, people automatically thought you were going to be an authority on the Bible. Now, people are taking religion to learn about what’s out there-and to learn about how human beings relate to each other.” Lonnie Kliever, chairman of Southern Methodist University’s religious studies department, said undergraduate religion enrollment doubled this year at SMU. But, he added, students are choosing different courses from those in the past.”Today’s focus of religion is not devotional,”Kliever said.”Students are now studying Hinduism, Buddhism, mysticism or ethics-courses that reveal the relationship between religion and personal experience … courses that focus on the nature of self.” In addition, he said, many students are studying religion to understand the world better.”Religion and politics no longer exist in separate, logic-type departments,”he said.”In order to understand far-reaching political and economic phenomenon, students are going to have to understand what religion means.” The late John Fenton, professor of religion at Emory, said in a recent interview that the growth in religion enrollment at the school is due in part to Emory’s large number of Asian-American students, many of whom study Asian religion to learn about their cultural heritage.

Many second-generation Asian-Americans, Fenton said, did not learn about their culture in high school American history classes, nor did they learn about it from their parents, who were”too busy learning English or making a living.”(STORY CAN END HERE. BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

While many college courses focus on religion’s transcendent aspects, some also highlight its rich cultural and artistic heritage.

The University of Texas in Austin offers classes in the Yiddish language and in Yiddish film and drama, Jewish folklore and the intellectual history of Eastern European Jews.”I have 23 students this year in my Yiddish language class, the largest class I’ve had yet,”said Professor Itzik Gottesman.”Many of the students have a grandparent who speaks Yiddish and they want to communicate with them. A number of students are just interested in finding out about the culture.”

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