Religious Studies

Course summary

The new OCR Religious Studies course is designed to build upon the OCR GCSE course and provides a natural progression for students, although it is not essential that you have completed the GCSE course first. There are three units of study in this course. The Philosophy of Religion unit will cover the influences of Ancient Greek philosophy and arguments for God’s existence and other major philosophical debates. It will also look at a range of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, drawing on philosophers ranging from Bertrand Russell to Kant and David Hume. In the Religious Ethics part of the course, you will study a range of ethical theories, from Kant’s Categorical Imperative to Aquinas Natural Moral Law. We will also consider what it means to talk about ethics and whether or not ethics can be considered either relative or absolute. To complete the A Level, you will study further topics in Y13 such as Religious Language and Experience, as well as applied ethical theories and concepts of conscience. The final part of the A Level concerns developments in Christian religious thought. Here you will look at how Christian beliefs and values have developed over time. This will include looking at how religious scriptures have been composed and interpreted, as well as the challenges of modern Christianity to an established faith. This will include such topics as liberation theology, feminist theology and a detailed study of the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.