Review: Vast in Scope but Lacking in Theoretical Cohesion

These two elegantly produced volumes, vast in scope and (for their contents) reasonably priced, will perform both service and disservice for some time to come.

The editors of each of the entries—Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism and then Judaism, Christianity and Islam—have provided rich slices of the literary inheritance of each of these traditions. Everyone in the field would profit from considering the texts presented here; they take us up to our own time, well beyond any restrictive notion of canon. At the same time, texts typically considered to be authoritative are also represented.

The format of presentation is rigorously chronological, and the discussion for the most part is historical (with some theological consideration), so that students as well as teachers will profit from considering the range of literature involved. Indeed, the chronologies of the literature presented undermine the order of presentation in the volumes, a point that should have been addressed by the general editor in the introduction. Other editors might have made different choices of texts, preferred other translations, and/or taken a different route in assessing the development of a given tradition. But that is the world of critical discussion.