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RR 2000/276 The World's Religions (2nd edition)
Ninian Smart Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1998 608 pp. ISBN 0 521 63139 4; 0 521 63748 1 paperback L45.00 ($69.95); L19.95 ($27.95) paperback Keyword Religion
This is a new edition of a standard text which sets out to describe how the religions of the world have developed, and place them in their social context. The first edition appeared in 1989 (RR 93/11 for a subsequent paperback reprint), just before the changes in the world order brought about by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Here the chapter on Eastern Europe has been extensively re-written and there is a new chapter surveying the standing of religion at the end of the twentieth century.
An introductory chapter attempts a definition of religion and explains the rationale of the study of religions. Seven dimensions of religious experience, common to some degree to all religions, are identified and outlined in some detail: practical and ritual, narrative or mythic, doctrinal and philosophical, social and institutional material. These dimensions give a structure to the book which explores the ways in which they have been manifested by different religions through their history. The term "religion" is treated widely to include philosophies and secular ideologies, which often show at least some of the dimensions which, in turn, provide a useful framework for determining whether and how far something is a religion.
The first part of the book takes the history of religion up to the start of the modern age (varying in time in different parts of the world). The first chapter is a sensitive and painstaking examination of the religious beliefs of prehistoric peoples....