The Norton Anthology of World Religions
by Jack Miles
“To see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will ... In that capacity lies the foundation of human sympathy and cultural wisdom.” —JACK MILES, from the Preface
I just listened to Terry Gross interviewing Jack Miles in Fresh Air. I recommend everyone to listen to this interview.
"This magisterial Norton Anthology,
edited by world-renowned scholars under the direction of Pulitzer Prize
winner Jack Miles, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts
from the world’s major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism (Volume 1);
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Volume 2). The anthology brings together
foundational works—the Bhagavad Gita, the Daodejing, the Bible, the Qur'an—with
the writings of scholars, seekers, believers, and skeptics whose voices over
centuries have kept these religions vital. To help readers encounter strikingly
unfamiliar texts with pleasure, this Norton Anthology provides accessible
introductions, head notes, annotations, pronouncing glossaries, maps,
illustrations, and chronologies. It also includes a dazzling general
introduction by Jack Miles that questions whether religion can be defined and
illuminates how world religions came to be acknowledged and studied, absorbed
and altered, understood and misunderstood.
For readers of any religion or none,
The Norton Anthology of World Religions opens new worlds that, as Miles
writes, invite us all "to see others with a measure of openness, empathy,
and good will…In that capacity lies the foundation of human sympathy and
cultural wisdom."
48 pages of color illustrations"
Jack Miles (Ph.D.
Harvard) is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with the
University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with
the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent 1960–70 as a Jesuit
seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University, where he
completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being
named a MacArthur Fellow for 2003-07.
