This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Educational Institution gathers six universities and colleges whose relevance to the atlas is a specific religious studies program, laboratory or department rather than the institution as a whole.
Three trace a direct denominational origin later secularised or broadened. Yale was chartered in 1701 by Connecticut Congregationalist ministers to train an educated, orthodox clergy; its theological department, formalised in 1822 as Yale Divinity School, is now nonsectarian and trains ministers and scholars across a wide range of traditions. Suomi College and Theological Seminary was founded in 1896 by the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to train Finnish speaking clergy; its seminary separated in 1958, and the college itself closed in 2023 as Finlandia University. The University of Vienna, the oldest university in the German speaking world, carries its religious weight through a Department of the Study of Religions, chaired first in 1955 within Catholic Theology and made independent in 1999.
Two are secular institutions whose relevance comes from a research program on the paranormal housed within them. Duke University's psychology department hosted J. B. Rhine's laboratory from 1930, where he coined the term extrasensory perception. The University of Virginia, founded deliberately secular by Thomas Jefferson with no divinity school, houses Ian Stevenson's Division of Perceptual Studies, founded in 1967 to investigate claimed memories of past lives.
The American Academy of Asian Studies stands apart, a short lived San Francisco graduate school, 1950 to 1968, that taught Asian philosophy and religion as living paths rather than academic subjects, its faculty including Alan Watts.