At TCU, our ties with the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, inform our campus today.   As a church-related University, those ties are strong and vibrant.  Because of this, we support an education that blends together faith, reason and intellectual curiosity on a campus where individuals from all religious traditions and spiritual paths make up our campus community.

It is because of this tie and not in spite of it that TCU upholds a Religious Holiday Policy.  Advocated for by student groups, unanimously approved by TCU Student Government Association, and voted into approval by TCU Faculty Senate, this policy allows students to take an excused absence from classes to observe their religious holiday.

To read the formal Religious Holiday Policy, approved by TCU Faculty Senate in the spring of 2020, please click here.

We recommend that students examine each syllabus at the beginning of the semester for potential conflicts, notify the instructor/professor, and follow their directions as to how to request accommodations.  For an email template, please click here.  

For students, faculty, and staff curious about the religious holiday calendar, please see the chart below.  Please direct questions to faith@tcu.edu or 817-257-7830.

Please note that the list that follows is not exhaustive. It includes notable festivals and holy days that may require appropriate accommodations for students and employees; although by no means are all religious traditions represented in the TCU community. If your particular holiday is missing, please contact us at faith@tcu.edu and let us know.  Note that some holidays are tied to the lunar calendar or to particular cultural patterns that vary by region, and this means the official date of the holiday can be fluid. Dates marked with a double asterisk (**) denote occasions which will likely result in significant restrictions on academic activity.

Islamic Holidays: Regional customs or moon sightings may cause a variation of the date for Islamic holidays, which begin at sundown the day before the date specified for the holiday. The Islamic calendar is lunar and the days begin at sunset, so there may be one-day error depending on when the New Moon is first seen.

For holidays associated with Christianity, the following notations are used to denote observance by particular strands of the Christian tradition: RC-Roman Catholic P-Protestant O-Orthodox