Religion as we know it : an origin story

by Jack Miles

Other authorsChris Welch (Designer), Winton Kelly (Cover designer)

Paperback, 2020

Status

Available

Call number

200.9

Genres

Religion & Spirituality

Publication

New York : W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2020]

Description

"A short, provocative book on religion from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In his new book, acclaimed scholar Jack Miles poses a question: How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity-a religion inextricably bound to Western thought-Miles reveals how we in the West have come to isolate religion as an object of study, and how drastically our perception has changed over time and across societies. Through the break between the Christian and Jewish communities, the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam, and the growth of Western empires, Miles reveals how Western religious thought has always been based on comparison of the known with the emergent unknown. Religion as We Know It challenges readers to unmoor themselves from traditional thinking and observe how the events of the still-unfolding past continue to shape how we think of religion today"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member themulhern

One of those empty religion apologists. I got far enough into the book to notice that he makes the point that even the notion of comparative religions is a western idea. He argues that it arose from the extension of Christianity, which was a kind of modification of Judaism, to non-Jews, thus

forcing a separation of the religious and the cultural elements of Jewish practice which hadn't been necessary before.

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LibraryThing member vpfluke

In a way, this book is apology for the "Norton Anthology of World Religions", which Jack Miles edited. But this is a very interesting book in its own right. Once Europe discovered that there were many countries, and cultures. and a few other religions coming from the Renaissance Period, it

developed a global worldview. Miles, starting from looking at American religious pluralism, it proceeds looking at the worldview of Christianity from the early church, to the four cornered medieval hat (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the "long dead" Greco-Roman polytheism). The Renaissance and the Reformation brought the idea of "comparative religion". Then the roof was broadened looking at religion as a a discipline, particularly with Protestant scholarship, culminating with the First World's Parliament of Religions in 1893, 501 years after Columbus "discovered" the Americas. A final note is added as to how Miles has difficulty in absorbing a revised worldview himself.

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