Understanding World Religions

I wasn’t overly impressed with “Understanding World Religions in 15 Minutes a Day” by Garry Morgan. It wasn’t that it was poorly written, but there didn’t seem much substance to it. I suppose I shouldn’t expect an in-depth explanation on each subject if it’s just a short read, but still, I thought there would be a little more to it. It’s definitely a nice overview of religions, a sort of easy-to-read encyclopedia, if you will. But if you want a more detailed study of world religions, this is not the book for you.

The author did well to present a factual, unbiased representation of each religion. He admits that it is very possible that his personally beliefs could have influenced his writing, but his purpose was to give facts for each religion, not his opinions.

I appreciate his first defining the word “religion”, and explaining why he included some religions and not others. There were also times he divided certain religions into separate chapters based on their region or variance in beliefs, which resulted in a slightly more in-depth look. For example, Christianity was divided as Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, and Evangelical.

In Morgan’s 40 chapters, he also covered Native American religions, Judaism (historical and present), Zoroastrianism, Islam (divided in several chapters), Hinduism, 3 types of Buddhism, Jehovah’s Witness, Shinto, and Mormonism, just to name a few.