I finally finished a pretty daunting task on Friday. I finalized what the course reading would be for RELI 101: Sacred Texts and Ideas.
After spending hours of reading the scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, my mind is very overloaded.
The way these scriptures are written can be so completely different than another one. Selecting passages to read in which students would be able to understand without having them kill their instructor was tough. But after much work in Voorst’s Anthology of World Scriptures, I think I finally got it.
I selected passages out of each of those major world religions based on passages that focused on:
- History
- Organization
- Ethics
- Teaching
- Ritual
Now, all I need is to correct some errors that my wife caught on my syllabus, get some students in a classroom, and teach!
Travis Agnew serves as the Lead Pastor of Rocky Creek Church in Greenville, SC. His most recent book is Just (About) Married.
I took a religion 101 class in the late seventies, so I suppose this book would be outdated – you can tell just by the title, “The Religions of Man” – but it was excellent. By Huston Smith, a major scholar, so maybe he put out an update at some point, although, really, it can’t be that so much of this sort of information would have changed…
It covered all the major world religions, east and west – each chapter succinct but really an excellent overview. It was because of that book that, years later, I remembered how impressed I’d been with The Eightfold Path and undertook some independent reading in Buddhism that was a big influence on me.
I am a pretty good proofreader, if needed.