Rodgir Cohen
What does it mean to worship a god carved from stone, to bow toward Mecca five times a day, to seek liberation from the very self one assumed was most real? Religions of the World invites students into seventeen of humanity’s most consequential traditions - not as museum exhibits to observe from a safe distance, but as living intellectual and spiritual worlds that make genuine and often competing claims on our understanding of what is real, what is good, and what it means to be human.Spanning from the Vedic fire altars of ancient India and the temple precincts of pharaonic Egypt to the digital prayer communities of the twenty-first century, this textbook brings the full arc of world religious history into meaningful conversation. Each chapter pairs primary sources - from the Tao Te Ching and the Dhammapada to the Guru Granth Sahib and the Gathas of Zarathustra - with rigorous scholarly analysis, comparative frameworks, and ethical reflection on religion’s extraordinary capacity to liberate and to oppress, to heal and to wound, to build civilizations and to set them ablaze.Designed for senior undergraduate and graduate seminars, this text provides the depth, breadth, and critical apparatus that the academic study of religion demands. It treats students as the scholars they are becoming - capable of sitting with complexity, resisting easy synthesis, and carrying genuine questions forward.
