The World’s Religions
Huston Smith is best known for this, his book The World’s Religions, and a miniseries he hosted that inspired the book, called The Religions of Man. His 90 years of experience and lifelong pursuit of knowledge about the world’s major paths of faith are what he is known for.
This book is perhaps one of the most all-enveloping and well known explorations of the major religions of the world. For me it was highly educational, filling in many of the gaps about what I knew of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and others.
But perhaps even more impressive than the sheer facts was that Smith, despite his own upbringing as the child of Christian missionaries, treats each religion with the utmost respect and honor. Apparently he’s taken up multiple faith practices throughout his life and, in so doing, understands multiplicity better than most, and that honoring differences of faith is the perhaps one of the healthiest things we can do in a society that seems to be more splintered day by day.
This is not a book for wimps; it took me a solid two months to read, completely throwing off any reading momentum I’d had up until I started. It’s dense but readable and, if nothing else, is challenging to anyone with preconceived notions about any one religion. Having considered myself to be fairly open-minded until reading this, I’d venture to guess it’s going to be a challenging book for most, but worth reading despite that.
Certainly I have my own struggles with relative and absolute truth, and I have yet to decide if this book helped or harmed in my exploration, but I appreciate all that I learned in the process. If nothing else, it opened me up to more of what humanity as a whole believes (and doesn’t believe) about what is true regarding morals, time, life, death, nature and love. And that is valuable, regardless of the journey.
- February 22nd, 2010 at 12:00 pm
- Category: Faith, books
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