World Religions

Humans across the globe and throughout millennia have searched for answers to questions like, "why are we here?" or "what am I supposed to do with my life?" And the answers people have found, or created, or chosen, have varied as widely as the cultures and people themselves. Each chapter will introduce the reader to some ideas from that specific tradition that enlighten them as to how a specific group of people think, believe, and live. This text is set up to be an ebook. The various videos, links and resources will only really work if the user keeps to the digital format.

Open Educational Resource (OER) of primary source materials and study questions for the RELI30: Comparative Religion course taught at the University of the Pacific.

"“The Anthropology of Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion” is a classic course in departments of anthropology all over the world. In part, this is because every human culture engages with these topics: “magic,” “witchcraft,” and “religion.” Clearly, they are important topics for us, and their universal presence across cultures provides lessons about our shared nature as humans. But it’s also a classic course and a well-established area of study within the discipline of anthropology because, as it turns out, every culture engages with these topics in its own way."

The Bible is one of the most published books in human history. It is also one of the most misquoted, misunderstood and misused books in human history. This happens because people are not always aware that the Bible is not a book, it is a collection of diverse writings. The Bible might even be called an anthology, and it will include everything from poetry to genealogy, pithy sayings to architectural mandates, mythology to letters. Knowing what one is reading helps one understand the ideas in the writings. We read letters in the context of who wrote them and who received them. We read sermons understanding the speaker's perspective may differ from the listener's perspective. So this text is an attempt to give historic, literary, geographical and cultural context to a complex and often poorly understood set of materials. This is very much an ebook, and needs to be used in that format. Pdfs and other printed versions will lose a great deal of the content.

The book proposes the hypothesis that six generic ways of being religious may be found in any large-scale religious tradition such as Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism: sacred rite, right action, devotion, shamanic mediation, mystical quest, and reasoned inquiry.

This open text provides original source readings for topics related to the foundations of Chinese and Japanese philosophy, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, Hindu-based philosophy and Jainism, Buddhist philosophy, Sun-Tzu, the Samurais, and Martial Arts, and other parts of the ancient world and parallels to the East.

"These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and in-justice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. The “clash of civilizations” thesis is a gimmick, like “The War of the Worlds,” better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time. This book, in focusing on the “Self” and the “Other” in Jewish and Muslim thought, is an attempt in this direction."

Studying the Bible: The Tanakh and Early Christian Writings is a university-level, textbook introduction to the study of the Bible, its literary forms, and historical and cultural contexts.

Orthodoxy is a book by G. K. Chesterton that has become a classic of Christian apologetics. It has been considered by the author a companion to his other work Heretics.In the book's preface, Chesterton states the purpose is to "attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it." In it, Chesterton presents an original view of Christian religion. He sees it as the answer to natural human needs, the "answer to a riddle" in his own words, and not simply as an arbitrary truth received from somewhere outside the boundaries of human experience.

Heretics is a collection of 20 essays originally published by G. K. Chesterton in 1905. The topics he touches upon range from Cosmology to Anthropology to Soteriology and he argues against French nihilism, German Humanism, English Utilitarianism, the Syncretism of "the vague modern", Social Darwinism, Eugenics and the arrogance and misanthropy of the European Intelligentsia. Together with Orthodoxy, this book is regarded as the finest flagship of his corpus of moral theology; a binary system in the cosmos of western philosophy.

A selection of Gandhi's writings. "The reader should approach this book of selections with that reservation in mind then he will be able to gather whatever help he can in the pursuit of his own ideal."