An institution of higher learning unlike any other, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley brings together scholars of the world’s diverse religions and wisdom traditions to advance new knowledge, seek fresh insight, and collaborate on solutions. We carry out our work by:

Educating scholars for vocations devoted to study and service

Equipping leaders for a world of diverse religions and cultures

Teaching patterns of faith that encourage justice and care of the planet

Serving as an educational and theological resource for local communities, the nation, and the world

The GTU is the most comprehensive center for the graduate study of religion in North America. With a focus on interreligious and interdisciplinary perspectives, GTU faculty and students engage the world’s great religions and wisdom traditions in contemporary contexts. The GTU educates innovative leaders for the academy, religious organizations, and the nonprofit sector, equipping scholars to embody the critical thinking, ethical frameworks, compassionate values, and spiritual foundations essential to building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

More than a school of theology, the GTU is a union of schools and programs that, together, represent the world’s major religions in collaboration. More than a graduate school, the GTU is an enterprise that cultivates the highest scholarly standards and provides opportunities to translate scholarship into solutions with impact. The GTU provides a unique community where scholars and practitioners from across the world's great religions gather for academic study of their own and of other traditions and disciplines.

The Graduate Theological Union is the most comprehensive center for the graduate study of religion in North America. With a focus on interreligious and interdisciplinary perspectives, GTU faculty and students engage the world’s great religions and wisdom traditions in contemporary contexts. The GTU educates innovative leaders for the academy, religious organizations, and the nonprofit sector, equipping scholars to embody the critical thinking, ethical frameworks, compassionate values, and spiritual foundations essential to building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Try a free PTE Taster Test today

Certify your English proficiency with PTE. The faster, fairer, simpler English test, accepted by thousands of universities around the world. PTE, Do it worry-free!

English Language Requirements

Berkeley, USA

Graduate Theological Union

Students in this concentration apply the resources of religious and theological traditions to the study of beauty – in its enrapturing power, in its perception as graceful manifestation of divine truth and goodness, and in its presentation as art.

On-Campus

Doctorate in Aesthetics

Students in Anthropology of Religion study cultural contexts, beginning with conceptualizing “religion” itself as the product of Christian, European, and colonial genealogies in order to understand this concept’s impact on the world.

Doctorate in Anthropology of Religion

Students in Art and Religion focus on the theological, cultural, and spiritual meanings expressed by, and experienced through, visual, plastic, performative, liturgical, and ritual arts across local and global religious contexts.

Doctorate in Art and Religion

A necessarily interdisciplinary and often cross-cultural field, the historical study of Buddhism at the GTU is well balanced with anthropological, cultural, and area studies perspectives.

Doctorate in Buddhist Studies

Students in this concentration study Christian religious experience. The focus is on Christian Spirituality in the context of the broad contemporary understanding of spirituality.

Doctorate in Christian Spirituality

Students in this concentration engage in the ongoing task of interpreting Christian belief in response to modern and post-modern cultures.

Doctorate in Christian Theology

Students in this concentration focus on a comparison of two or more theological approaches to topics in the field of ethics.

Doctorate in Comparative Ethics

The Comparative Religion concentration encourages the joint study of different religious traditions by exploring their fundamental themes, beliefs, and concerns, their principal figures and texts, and their variety of rituals and practices.

Doctorate in Comparative Religion

Inspired by an increasingly pluralistic global context that brings diverse religious worlds into contact, this concentration prepares students to engage in the study of the distinct theologies, practices, and ethics of different religions from a dialogical perspective.

Doctorate in Comparative Theology

The Ethics concentration prepares students to contextualize the major figures in the development of ethics and social theory, to interrelate ethics with a secondary concentration, to do research, and to construct an ethical argument.

Doctorate in Ethics

Students in this concentration work to develop competencies in broad-ranging aspects of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Doctorate in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Students in this concentration work to develop competencies in the study of Hindu Sacred Texts and their interpretation.

Doctorate in Hindu Sacred Texts

Students in the Hindu Studies concentration focus on the history of Hindu thought traditions and their cultural expressions.

Doctorate in Hindu Studies

Students in this concentration study the Christian religion through critical historical investigation of the unity, diversity, and development of Christian communities, their material cultures and spiritualities, and their relations to other religions.

Doctorate in History of Christianity

This concentration focuses on the systematic study of the Muslim intellectual tradition devoted to explorations of divine revelation, religious belief, and philosophical developments.

Doctorate in Islamic Philosophy and Theology

Students in this concentration work to develop competencies in the study of the Qur’an and Prophetic Tradition. Contextualizing these foundational sources through their historical development and the contributions of generations of Muslim scholars, students study related texts and traditions, including Islamic law, theology, and spirituality that together inform the textual and interpretative community of Islam.

Doctorate in Islamic Sacred Texts

Students in this concentration engage in the interdisciplinary study, research, and teaching of Islam in its theological, historical, cultural, and comparative contexts, with a focus on Islamic texts in contemporary contexts, Islam as a lived tradition, and the global expressions of Muslim diversity, both past and present.

Doctorate in Islamic Studies

Students in the Jain Studies concentration study Jain philosophy, ethics, and living streams of religious experience based on non-harming.

Doctorate in Jain Studies

Students in this concentration study Jewish history, culture, and literature from antiquity until the present.

Doctorate in Jewish Studies

Drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, sociology, literary studies, theology, history, and spirituality, students develop projects that interpret New Religious Movements from many possible angles in studies of modern culture.

Doctorate in New Religious Movements

Students in this concentration engage in multidisciplinary study of Christian literature (both canonical and non-canonical).

Doctorate in New Testament

Students in this concentration work to develop competencies in broad-ranging aspects of rabbinic literature.

Doctorate in Rabbinic Literature

Students in this concentration study literature, literary theory, and religious studies, paying special attention to the intersections among these disciplines.

Doctorate in Religion and Literature

Students in this concentration acquire the requisite skills to investigate “lived religion” both over time and amid contemporary contexts.

Doctorate in Sociology of Religion

The primary goal of the concentration in Theology and Science is to promote creative mutual interaction between natural science and academic theology.

Graduate Theological Union

Introduction

Graduate Theological Union

English Language Requirements

Locations

Programs

Institution also offers:

Questions