Sacred Texts of the World

Short Review: A broadly helpful look at religious texts from a wide variety of religions. It is hard to understand how there ever was a movement that thought that all religions were basically the same. The way different texts are used by different religions is so different that it is hard to even know what it means to be a sacred text. Hardy's presentation of the Protestant Bias, the idea that other religions use their sacred texts in basically the same way as Protestants use scripture, is very helpful.

The final lecture looks at the US constitution and similar documents as if they were sacred texts to work through the ideas of what it means to be a sacred text. That was a helpful method to understand the many different ways that sacred texts work.

My fuller review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/sacred-texts/