Corduan - POCKET GUIDE TO WORLD RELIGIONS

WINFRIED CORDUAN

It would be impossible for me to count how many times someone has asked one for the title of a "short and handy" summary of world religions. I count it a privilege to be able to contribute such a reference tool myself. Obviously there is danger insofar as anything "short and handy" could also become "generalized and false" rather than "precise and accurate." I trust that this little volume will fit into the latter category.

This pocket guide is based on many years of firsthand study of world religions and teaching on the subject at many levels. For a fuller survey, see my Neighboring Faiths, and for a booklength discussion of how the world's religions are related to Christianity, see my A Tapestry of Faiths. Irving Hexham has produced two helpful reference tools that dovetail with this book: Concise Dictionary of Religion and Pocket Dictionary of New Religious Movements. All of these books are published by InterVarsity Press.

After looking at many sources for the numbers of adherents and the distribution of religions, I decided to follow most closely the website Adherents, especially its chart "Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents" , because this site takes the ambiguity of these numbers into greater account than do most handbook listings.

Thanks need to go to my friend and editor, Jim Hoover of InterVarsity Press, for suggesting the idea for this book and then letting me experiment with the format. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at Taylor University for their encouragement, particularly Phil Loy, Mike Harbin and Bill Heth. June, my wife, was with one every step of the way, as always. She proofread any manuscript and had lots of great ideas on how to make the book more useful. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my mother-in-law, Beryl Anderson, who is always there for us and who manages to think highly of whatever I do.

It was New Year's Eve 1999, the birth of the new millennium. A famous TV personality was interviewing the Dalai Lama, head of Tibetan Buddhism. "Would you tell mne, Your Holiness," fawned the reporter, "do they celebrate New Year's in the Islamic religion?"

It is, of course, possible that the interviewer thought the Dalai Lama, though a Buddhist himself, was a good source of information about Islam. More likely, this could have been a slip of the tongue. But most probably, the reporter was genuinely confused.

And who wouldn't be these days? There was a time in America when the question "What is your religion?" was intended to elicit an answer such as "Presbyterian," "Catholic," or `Jewish." Everyone seemed to fit into a preconceived pattern of religion. Now we are becoming far more used to the idea that the answer to the question about someone's religion may include Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or any number of other faiths.

Your coworkers, fellow students or neighbors down the street may be immigrants who have brought their home culture with them. In previous generations, people coming to this county often left their original identity behind them, seeking to blend in and copying the lifestyle of those they perceived as being typically American. Many immigrants even Anglicized their names so as to be less conspicuous, whereas nowadays getting to know your new neighbors may begin with the seemingly insurmountable hurdle of learning to say their names correctly.

Here's the bad news: this book will be of little help to you with learning to pronounce your neighbor's name. But the good news is that this book will help you understand at least one part of your new neighbor's culture: his or her religion. This book is written for those of us who do not know anything about other religions and do not have the option of subjecting ourselves to lengthy and laborious study.

Imagine we find out that the new family who has just moved in across from us is Hindu, and we would like to have them come over to our house for dessert or a meal, but we don't want to embarrass ourselves by not having a clue as to what they believe. Much as we would want to, we cannot afford to take a week off from work to do an in-depth study of Hinduism. We need some quick, practical help-now. Of course, we can go on the Internet and see if we can find what we need courtesy of Google. Unfortunately, although we are bound to get a lot of information instantaneously, we are going to find so many conflicting and obscure claims that, without further help, all of that content may not be of more use than an encyclopedia written in a foreign language. This book is intended to fill this gap.

Everyone has heard certain things about other religious, but few of us are in a position to check out the rumors. Here are some common questions people have:

What does the red dot on an Indian woman's forehead mean?

Are Muslims commanded to conquer the world for Islain?

Do Buddhist monks practice martial arts?

Is the emperor of Japan still considered a god?

Do all Jews want to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem?

Why does the Svetambara sect of the Jain religion recognize different Tirthankaras from the Digambara sect?

Well, okay, the last question is not likely to come up anytime soon in casual conversation. But there are many important concerns for which Ave need to get straight answers lest we embarrass ourselves or, worse yet, offend our neighbors.

What are some things we need to know about a religion? Well, you might start out by saying that it would be good to know what the people believe. Not a bad answer, but-believe it or not-not necessarily the best one. For a lot of people, what they believe is not nearly as important as what they practice. If you asked then to describe their religion, they would probably spend a lot of time telling you all about what they do and not necessarily much about what they believe.

Think about it: two people may hold the same beliefs in their minds and follow different religious practices, or two people could believe different things but do some of the same things. For example, some people may believe similar things about God but pray to him in different styles, or some other people may follow similar patterns in how they pray to God but believe different things about him.

So we would like to know what members of different religions do as well as what they believe. Of course, the doing part contains a lot of aspects: how to worship; how to be born, many or die; how to relate to people who are not of their religion; how to dress; what to eat and how; what holidays to observe and how; how to make sure nothing evil will befall them... You get the picture.