This course will explore how leading Western philosophers and theologians such as Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Martin Buber, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Rowan Williams, and Jacques Derrida have defined and debated, defended and attacked religion. Some are pious and some are atheists. Some are philosophers who explain why religion is essential for human life, and some are philosophers who just as rationally explain why religion is irrational and illusory. Is religious faith blind submission? Or can it be part of an intellectually vital and realistic view of the world? Or could it be both, that religion is complicated - at times bound up with the worst, at other times bound up with the best?