The Norton Anthology of World Religions

 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.