An Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings and Reliable Resources !
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An Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings and Reliable Resources ! If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you. British fantasy author Terry Pratchett There is only so much one can say and cover in any single book, but this basic fact of human finitude is particularly extreme in a book like Comparing Religions, which attempts to say at least something about pretty much everything. We are, of course, aware of the inherent impossibility (or absurdity) of such a project. As a partial response, we are providing the present annotated bibliography as a running commentary on the published text. A bibliography is a list of books, essays, and, more recently, Internet sources on a particular subject or theme. An annotated bibliography is a list of such sources that contains descriptive or interpretive comments on each of its entries. These descriptive or evaluative summaries are called annotations. They are generally composed of brief sentences, which do not need to be sentences in the full grammatical sense. In some cases here, we have taken this genre further and turned some of these annotations into mini-essays on a particular comparative topic or body of literature that we did not have space to treat in the textbook. We have written all of this with the introductory student and the traditional undergraduate research paper in mind. We have listed only easily accessible English sources. It is important to know, however, that there are immensely sophisticated literatures on the study of religion in other languages, including and especially French and German. Generally speaking, we have focused in this annotated bibliography on texts that fulfill one or more of the following five criteria: 1. the work is explicitly comparative in nature; 2. the work is relatively accessible and not addressed only to other scholars; 3. the work is one of the definitive works on a subject featured in the respective chapter; 4. the work is about a relevant topic that we were not able to treat in the chapter; and/or 5. the work offers an alternative or counter view to those highlighted in the chapter. As with all rules, there are a few exceptions to these general criteria in what follows, but these were our basic principles. Finally, it is important to note that we have not listed sources that we employed and cited in the chapters themselves, as those sources and our commentary on them can easily be found there. It seemed redundant to repeat that material here. What this means for the undergraduate researcher is that any initial study of a particular subject should include both the chapter material, where many of the classic texts on that subject are treated or at least cited, and the annotated bibliography material, where more material is annotated. Another way of saying this is that the annotated bibliography should not be used alone, as it was not written to stand alone. It was written as a supplement to the chapters, whose material is assumed. We are fully aware, of course, that students will be tempted to simply Google a topic or go to Wikipedia for their research. This can be a helpful beginning, for sure, and there is a vast amount of wonderful material available on the Internet (we have included some of it below). Still, such simple searches seldom constitute adequate research, and it is a dubious comparative method that relies entirely on a computer program to perform one’s observation, selection, pattern recognition, and classification, much less one’s theorizing of what these observations and data mean. Internet search engines are basically comparative engines (they look for similarities and differences), but they work with very primitive comparative principles. They do not call this “surfing” for nothing. Generally speaking, such methods are only a kind of cognitive skimming on the surface of things. Here, then, is a bibliography of reliable resources for the serious student who wants to do real research, as opposed to superficial surfing. The vast majority of these are “peer-reviewed,” that is, they are only published after being anonymously reviewed and critically analyzed by other scholars. This does not make them perfect or entirely objective, of course. As we have repeatedly made clear, there is no such thing as pure objectivity. The peer review process, then, does not render a source infallible or neutral. It simply assures its over-all quality and the likelihood that it can function as an accurate barometer of the state and direction of the discussion in question at the particular point in time it was published (hence the importance of !2 dates attached to the publication details). The present annotated bibliography follows the discussions of the chapters of Comparing Religions. The books are arranged in each section, more or less, along the lines and development of the chapter discussion. What follows makes absolutely no pretense to completion or exhaustion. Indeed, the real question when writing this was always “So, where do we stop?” For this and simple digital reasons (read: cheap and easy to update), we consider this part of Comparing Religions to be very much a work in progress. Any further suggestions for additions to this annotated bibliography would be much appreciated. Please supply both a full reference and a brief one- or two-sentence annotation, as we have done for the references below. Such suggested additions can be submitted here: hyperlink. ! Introduction: Beginnings ! In fact, if I went back to college today, I think I would probably major in comparative religion, because that’s how integrated it is in everything that we are working on and deciding and thinking about in life today. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, 7 August 2013 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4461670 ! The Introduction attempts to set the tone or spirit of the comparative project as a whole. Here are a few books that capture especially well this same spirit or “feel” of the comparative study of religion, from either an autobiographical or a biographical perspective. ! !3 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: Life of Friedrich Max Muller (Chatto and Windus, 1974). The range and scope of this book has since been surpassed by the work of Lourens van den Bosch (cited in chapter 2), but Chaudhuri’s biography remains a wonderful introduction to both the life of a pioneering scholar and the birth of the professional study of comparative religion. That it is written by a major Bengali intellectual adds a rich cross-cultural perspective. Aril L. Goldman, The Search for God at Harvard (Ballantine Books, 1992). Although technically about the graduate study of religion, this remains one of the best books on the promises, costs, and culture of the comparative study of religion at any level. Written by an Orthodox Jewish journalist working at The New York Times who took a year off to study at Harvard Divinity School, the book inspired a number of imitations and attempted traditionalist responses, but none that measure up to the original. Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). As an intellectual and spiritual autobiography from one of the most accomplished scholars of comparative religion working today, this book captures beautifully what it can mean for someone from a Christian background to study religion comparatively. Reads well in conjunction with Goldman, who studied with Eck at Harvard Divinity School. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperOne, 1995). Although not technically an autobiography, this book by New Testament scholar Marcus Borg contains autobiographical material and captures especially well what can happen when a person of faith takes up the tools of the modern study of religion and engages them seriously and deeply. Very accessible. Dana Sawyer, Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper. Living the World’s Religions (Louisville, Kentucky: Vons Vitae, 2014). This is the definitive biography of the man who helped pioneer the comparative study of religion in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s. Sawyer treats Smith’s life and work both sympathetically and critically. Unlike the Goldman and Eck books, this is not an autobiography, although Smith has written one of those as well: Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography (New York: HarperOne, 2010). !4 Jon R. Stone, The Craft of Religious Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). A collection of fourteen autobiographical essays by major scholars of religion, explaining why they do what they do and how they do it. This volume is particularly helpful for its first-person descriptions of a wide range of comparative methods, from the philosophical to the sociological. Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffe, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1989). Jung’s life and thought had a tremendous influence on the development of the study of religion in the twentieth century. This is his autobiography, written with Jaffe. It captures well Jung’s spiritual journey from his early disillusionment with Lutheran Christianity to the eventual development of his own comparative practice: depth psychology. ! 1. Comparison in Global History: If Horses Had Hands ! In all ages people have distinguished interaction with superhuman powers from other forms of action. In different times and cultures, religious actors and institutions have seen each other as similar, no matter whether this perception was expressed in competition and polemics or in cooperation, assimilation, and identification. Martin Riesbrodt, The Promise of Salvation, A Theory of Religion, xii ! Chapter 2 seeks to demonstrate that comparison is neither exclusively modern nor western, that it reaches back, particularly in its implicit theological and mythological forms, as far as we can see in the historical record.