Book Review: Understanding World Religions in 15 Minutes a Day

I have high standards for the books I read. Whether fiction or non-fiction a great book is one that shows understanding and respect of the craft itself and one that gives the reader something in return for the time they have invested in reading. All too often today I find that even though I read a lot and a wide variety that even the best looking books have some serious shortcomings.

When I first saw this book as an option on the blogggers review list I was really excited! The subject of world religions is an interesting one to me and I have done a little reading on some of the prominent ones but I really liked the idea of having a guidebook that would give me short overviews of many different ones and could be an easy reference book anytime I encountered something 'new'.

This book is divided into 40 brief chapters that cover about the same number of religions from around the world. The chapters are uncomplicated and entirely readable within the advertised 15 minute window. The chapters are largely historical in nature and provide the background story for the beginnings of each religion. In this context the book does live up to it's informational promise.

What I found lacking in the chapters was more information on the specific beliefs and tenants of the specific religion. I really hoped to find in these short chapters more info and discussion on the human side of things, what people believed and what their motivations (be it cultural or other) are for their belief and this book just didn't deliver on that. While in some context it is helpful to know the historical  background I think it really would have been more practically useful to include more of each religion's dogma.

Something that I came to suddenly realize after getting several chapters into the book was that there are no footnotes in this book. I flipped through the pages looking for some reference, or at the very least- bibliography that would allow the reader to verify the content or do further study on their own and there is none. This fact was extremely disappointing to me. As far as I am concerned a non-fiction 'study' book with no footnotes or reference to original source documentation/content is as good as fiction, or at the very least, opinion. As the book is not billed as opinion I am given no choice but to question the accuracy of the material it contains. One glaring example of the un-sourceable material was on page 83 where the categorization of the Islamic branches being described is noted as being derived " from a conversation with Samer Abdulraman" with no information as to who this person is or why he is an authority on the subject being discussed.

I had two other real issues with this book. One being that I assumed coming from a Christian publisher that this book would be written from a Christian perspective- I really didn't feel that was true. I wanted to hear a good explanation of these other religions with the starting point of a Christian worldview. What else would you expect from a Christian book- right? Part two of my disappointment was that throughout the book the author uses God with a capitol G in describing all of the gods of the world. I don't remember ever seeing this type of usage before. As far as I was aware the capitalization of God refers specifically to the singular Christian God where as the lowercase usage of god referred to the wide multitude of pagan deities. To put all "God's" on the same plane is not consistent with Christian beliefs.

In the end the concept of this format- that one could get a lot of info in a short-read time commitment- is a great one. While much of the information contained in this book seems to be accurate (from my admittedly limited knowledge) I have no way of confirming that without footnotes. A book that I hoped to be a great reference for my library and something that I could turn to over and over again has not completely measured up and that's the most disappointing thing of all because I think that with just a little more work this could have been a great reference book- even if I didn't completely agree with the author's perspective.

Final rating: 2

I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher in exchange for a honest review and opinion of the product.