This is a book by Huston Smith.
When I first saw this book, I was intrigued by the description on the jacket, so I decided to buy it. After reading the book, I find that this description is tilted to the introduction more than the rest of the book, but I did like the book overall.
I really liked the beginning of the book, but got bogged down a little in the middle - it was just not as interesting there to me. The latter part was worth the slog I had to get to it though.
As many people know, Huston Smith wrote a famous book on the world's religions. Probably fewer people know that he was born in China to missionary parents and later hung out with Huxley and even Timothy Leary. Mr. Smith is now over 90 years old - he wrote this book only a few years ago.
In the Introduction, Smith laments secularism, and points out that secularists mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence when considering the existence of God. I have to agree that these two things are NOT equivalent, but one hears many (even well educated) people say this or something that means this frequently. That being said, Mr. Smith does not let Christian fundamentalists off the hook. He prefers a middle road I guess.
In Part 1, Smith presents his take on the Christian Worldview - some of this got a tad tedious for me. In Part 2, he presented what he called the Christian Story - I thought this much better for the most part, but he does seem to have a fairly conservative viewpoint on many points here, which kind of surprised me given that he taught at Berkeley.
Part 3 looked at the three main branches of Christianity today. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school, but I still learned a few things I had not before on Catholicism. I found it interesting to learn about the Eastern Orthodox view of the truly corporate nature of the church and its heavy emphasis on mysticism; this was not what I expected given the name Orthodox, and I learned that I have much in common with this group. His discussion on Protestantism was very enlightening - I had never really gotten the justification by faith thing before as I do now.
All in all, I liked the book. It is middle of the road I guess, but as many people have strong opinions on the subjects considered, it may not please all readers.
When I first saw this book, I was intrigued by the description on the jacket, so I decided to buy it. After reading the book, I find that this description is tilted to the introduction more than the rest of the book, but I did like the book overall.
I really liked the beginning of the book, but got bogged down a little in the middle - it was just not as interesting there to me. The latter part was worth the slog I had to get to it though.
As many people know, Huston Smith wrote a famous book on the world's religions. Probably fewer people know that he was born in China to missionary parents and later hung out with Huxley and even Timothy Leary. Mr. Smith is now over 90 years old - he wrote this book only a few years ago.
In the Introduction, Smith laments secularism, and points out that secularists mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence when considering the existence of God. I have to agree that these two things are NOT equivalent, but one hears many (even well educated) people say this or something that means this frequently. That being said, Mr. Smith does not let Christian fundamentalists off the hook. He prefers a middle road I guess.
In Part 1, Smith presents his take on the Christian Worldview - some of this got a tad tedious for me. In Part 2, he presented what he called the Christian Story - I thought this much better for the most part, but he does seem to have a fairly conservative viewpoint on many points here, which kind of surprised me given that he taught at Berkeley.
Part 3 looked at the three main branches of Christianity today. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school, but I still learned a few things I had not before on Catholicism. I found it interesting to learn about the Eastern Orthodox view of the truly corporate nature of the church and its heavy emphasis on mysticism; this was not what I expected given the name Orthodox, and I learned that I have much in common with this group. His discussion on Protestantism was very enlightening - I had never really gotten the justification by faith thing before as I do now.
All in all, I liked the book. It is middle of the road I guess, but as many people have strong opinions on the subjects considered, it may not please all readers.
