Customer Reviews

The Philosophy of Religion Reader

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This books contains a large number of selections, sixty-three in all, that are an even mixture of very long essays, shorter essays the length of a typical journal article, and even shorter but sufficient essays that are compare with a shorter journal article. The printing of the book (particularly the page and type size, which make the works easily readable) enables long essays to be included that would have taken up 40 journal pages, but are here printed in 20 easily read pages. The diversity of size is matched by the diversity of topics, religious traditions, and the diversity of authors, ranging from the very well known to lesser known, contemporary to ancient, and from Western to Eastern. There are essays by Plantinga, Rowe, Craig, Collins, Copan, Swinburne, Anselm, Boethius, Aquinas, Augustine, Avicenna, Maimonides, Nagarguna, Ramanuajuna and many others. The older essays, and the contemporary ones, make this book the one to take to a desert island, if one could only take one philosophy of religion book.

This companion reader is able to stand alone, but the most value you can get from it is with the book also written by Chad Meister. My advice is to buy both!

This text was chosen for an undergraduate course in the philosophy of religion. The text was very poorly organized: nearly all readings were very short (3-5 page) excerpts from much longer, more intricate texts. The book does nothing for the expert, misleads the advanced student, and provides little interest even for the absolute novice.

While many of the texts that the readings are derived from are important and exciting, the fact the that text is simply a series of overly-short, poorly organized excerpts is really quite disappointing. While the compiled primary sources of even a third of the material here would have been a great resource, even a reader like this could be improved. The reader is divided by theme, with little focus or obvious intent. The text simply drifts from one vague subject to another.

Further, the commentary was downright silly, the editor chose to remove footnotes from the pieces he excerpted, and the piece was ultimately not 'user-friendly'.