Our Religions

Very good

There is a great benefit to hearing about a religious tradition from a scholar who has chosen that tradition as his own. This is the novel approach taken in "Our Religions". All too often, a person writes a comparative book only to shake fingers at other people's faiths. I now have a new respect for Hinduism's tolerance of other religions. I have a new respect for Islam and Judaism. Each section devotes a good amount of history to the religion being covered.Personally, I have chosen Deism for my own religious view, so I wasn't swayed by any of the writers. Although, I am most curious about Confucianism now. I am grateful to Sharma for bringing together these different traditions in a scholarly and respectful way.

The book itself is great. I like the formate, with scholars from each tradition explaining their own religious heritage, and I have found it remarkably informative for someone like me who had only a passing familiarity with most of the world's faiths other than my own. I've learned a lot from this book, and I like that I am getting an insider's view and not the perspective of someone mounting a polemic against someone else's faith, or even that of a detached outside.But the main thing that prompted me to write this review is to let other Kindle users know that the Kindle edition is frustratingly strewn with errors. Scanning mistakes abound, "modem" instead of "modern," for example, and, surprisingly often "Cod" instead of "God." Reading about "Almighty Cod" is amusing a time or two, but it gets old quickly. In the section on Hinduism there seem to be some Hindi-specific characters that don't convert into the Kindle fonts, leaving uninterpretable squiggles in the middle of names. I hope at some point Amazon does a corrected edition and updates my digital file, but right now it's clear that no one at HarperCollins even bothered to proof-read the Kindle edition.

Regardless of your religious propensity or affiliation, you need to read books like this to gain a perspective of what other people believe in. Unfortunately, most members of an organized religion don't even know the tenets of their own religion, never mind the others. Just because you were born into a religion shouldn't make you afraid to question some of its ideologies and educate yourself as to what's out there beside yours. A good book for agnostics.

This is a collection of fully academic essays by some of the most recognized scholars of religion. I was most interested in the chapter on Judaism, which is utterly brilliant.