Home

AU Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action - Monthly Musings | March 03, 2008

Monthly Musings
March 2008

Well, after an unintended break, I intend to get back to these monthly (rather than annual!) musings. This month I want to recommend a book. There are a million and one books about world religions, ranging from the excellent, through the jargon-loaded masquerading as up-to-date scholarship, to the bad and boring. It’s always interesting to read what colleagues have chosen as important to point out and emphasize as important, and to reflect on what they have left out. Occasionally, I think that some religionists wouldn’t recognize a religion if they fell over one, so filled they are with ingenious and innovative concepts of religion. And not enough of the current crop of introductory books on world religions helps the reader understand the power of religion for good and evil in our violent century.

In an act of filial piety, I want to draw your attention to John Bowker’s Beliefs That Changed The World: the history and ideas of the great religions (Quercus, 2007). Many years ago, John was my teacher at Cambridge and then Lancaster universities. I was not always an excellent student but he was always an inspiring, if formidable, teacher, and I have lived off some of his ideas for over 30 years. In about 200 pages, he touches on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Indian beliefs, Buddhism, Chinese beliefs and Japanese beliefs. He is a courteous and acute observer, and himself a man of faith, but he does not indulge those who let religion off the hook by claiming that bad deeds are nothing to do with real religion. In the introduction, he writes that ‘there are specific religious beliefs which actually encourage, or even demand, behaviours that can only be described from outside the system as evil’ (p.5). The book has excellent and telling pictures as well as a compelling text. I have noticed it in Borders, on sale for only $7.99. There is no reason not to rush out and buy this.

Martin Forward

Posted by admin at March 3, 2008 04:42 PM


 Digg it    del.icio.us  reddit
Email this URL to: . Your email address is:
Optional Message:

Copyright ©2005 IRFWP. All rights reserved.
Home | Top of the Page