The World's Religions: Worldviews and Contemporary Issues

by William A. Young

This package contains the following components:

-0205675115: World's Religions, The: Worldviews and Contemporary Issues

-0205708285: MyReligionKit

Genres: Religion, Reference, Nonfiction, History, Textbooks

448 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Wendy Wolpert-DeWitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise, clear, and well-written. Like any book intended to survey religions, there are mild inaccuracies or oversimplified areas. However, in general, the author does a nice job of clarifying the definition of "religion" for the scope of the book. This sets a tone that makes the material very useful and keeps cultural bias minimized.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for a class. Valuable overview of the world's major religions with a few more obscure ones included.

[Leroy Seat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine book giving a good and balanced view of the various world religions. But there were some (mostly minor) errors in the sections on Japanese religions, so it made me wonder what errors there were on religions that I (as well as the author) did not know a lot about from first-hand experience.

I looked forward to reading the third section, "The World's Religions and Contemporary Ethical Issues." But it turns out, as I should have realized to begin with, there is about as much difference within each of the major religions as there is between the religions. So this section ended up not being very helpful at all, except for pointing out the diversity within the various religious traditions.

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

William A Young obviously has an excellent command of the subject of World Religions, but he is a poor writer. There are numerous instances of bad grammar and punctuation, the text does not flow, and he inserts exclamation points where exclamation points clearly did not belong. In his writing, he focuses on giving information, but he does not seem to care whether the information is accessible or not. It's incredibly dry and not very readable.
That being said, there is a wealth of valuable information in this book. I think it gives fair and accurate descriptions of the histories, values, and practices of the world's major religions. I learned a lot from this book, but it was hard work.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great for an introduction to religion! I wanted to learn the basic FACTS of various religions and this book definitely delivered