Product Description

An easy-to-use and comprehensive encyclopedia of living faiths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #606765 in Books
• Published on: 1988-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 456 pages

The Times Educational Supplement
This is the most rare of reference books - one that is sure to be read for its own sake

The Daily Telegraph
A symposium of remarkably well-integrated essays by well-known scholars...a valuable work of reference

The Times
This excellent reference book....

Customer Reviews

An extremely readable reference
I bought this book for an Open University course; I ended up reading all of it - including the chapters not covered by the course!

The book consists of a series of lengthy essays, each by an expert on the religion concerned. I was about to say that there is one essay for each religion considered, but actually there is a disproportionate emphasis on Christianity here (Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy all get separate chapters to themselves, plus historical essays on 'the Early Church' and the Church in the Middle Ages!)

I would say that this lack of balance is one of the failings of this book. However, it redeems itself by its inclusivity: it does not limit itself to 'major religions, it also covers Confucianism, Taoism, even Marxism is treated as a faith!

The style of some of the essays is rather dated - the essay describing the follower of Confucius as suscribing to 'many of the values of an English gentlemen' still makes me smile! - but, on the whole, I found the old-fashioned appraoch rather refreshing.

Each author seems to have taken great care to describe how 'their' religion has been practised during the varous stages of its history (rather than taking a 'snapshot' of how they are practised today with an assumption that that has been true for all time).

The authors also appear fair in their concern to describe both majority and minority forms of the religion under consideration, without perjoritive language regarding the heterodox view.

A warning - some authors are not so balanced when writing about other religions! There does not seem to have been any editorial intervention regarding this. Personally, I find the attitudes towards another religion, thus demontrated, provide useful information about how the practitioners of one religion regard another, and would not wish this material to have been censored. Such writing also encourages a critical reading of how the author describes his own standpoint.

So, a little idiosyncratic, this book has a wealth of information in it; its historical attitude ensures that the content has not dated (even if the attitudes of some of the authors have!), and, most importantly, it is immensely readable! Recommended.