Religious and Spiritual Life
The Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (RSL) works to help students integrate what they care about most into their learning. RSL programs ensure that opportunities for spiritual engagement are part of a Vassar education—for religiously observant students, or spiritually seeking ones, and everything in between.
RSL oversees, advises, and supports a wide range of religious and civic communities and initiatives on campus, and plays an important role as a community liaison for the college in the mid-Hudson Valley. Our current programs are described below.
Spirituality and Service programs offer the Vassar community opportunities for service learning. Participants receive training, support, and tools for reflection, drawing on the resources of spiritual and religious traditions to sustain and enrich their work. In collaboration with the Office of Student Employment, RSL directs the college’s participation in the Federal Work Study Program in community service.
Peace and Justice programs explore traditions and tools for nonviolence in religious and political communities past and present, and bring resources to campus to help students work for peace.
Arts and Celebration programs give students skills and materials for creating public art, such as giant puppets, murals, luminarias, sculptures, performances, and practice in shaping community rites of passage to help open up opportunities for transformation and reflection.
Religious practice, ritual, and interpretation are recognized components of learning at Vassar and beyond, and offer shared experiences and opportunities for dialogue that engage questions of the sacred in secular culture.
As part of the support RSL staff provide to these program areas, staff members are available for pastoral counseling and spiritual guidance for any concern or question students may have. A diversity of advisors and consultants serve the campus community and the 12 different student religious groups at Vassar. RSL’s full-time staff are the director, the assistant director and Rose and Irving Rachlin advisor to Jewish students, the Tanenbaum inter-religious fellow (in partnership with Harvard Divinity School), the religious and spiritual life fellow, and the administrative assistant. Part-time affiliate advisors serve the Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and InterVarsity communities on campus. RSL has office and program space in the Chapel Tower and basement, as well as at the Bayit, Vassar’s Home of Jewish Campus Life at 51 Collegeview Avenue.
For more information about any of these programs, please come by the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life in the Chapel Tower (phone extension 5550) or visit our website at http://religiousandspirituallife.vassar.edu.