Customer Reviews

Religion: A Cross-Cultural Dictionary (Oxford Paperback Reference)

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Levinson presents elementary information on subjects such as Taboos, Life-Cycle Rites, Pilgrimmages, Witchcraft, Animism in addition to information on ten great world religions. His approach gives a view of what goes into the "behind-the-scenes" life of religions.

A book like this would be very hard for any one person to write; the amount of knowledge required is simply overwhelming. So it is not surprising that Levinson, despite good intentions, largely failed.

The first entry is ancestor worship, which I know only a little about, and I felt like I learned from it. If you don't know much about the articles, they're all like this.

Next was animism, which was a fair entry; and asceticism, which I can't evaluate. The astrology entry was good. Curiously I couldn't find any hint that it might be pseudo-science, but it was fascinating as a history and phenomenology. The entry on Bahai was just alright. He left out everything controversial, but the information he did present was accurate.

But the entry on Buddhism, from a scholarly point of view, was a joke. There was no hint of critical history, only a single paragraph covering the texts. He drastically misrepresents Theravada tradition; yet the sub-sections titled "Religious Practices" and "Festivals" dealt only with the practices of the Theravada, as though Tibetan or Japanese practices were identical.

Moving on, the entry on cannibalism seemed fine to me; I don't know much and was inclined to agree with what Levinson argued.

Next, Christianity: another horrible entry. His entry was downright theological in its lack of historical consideration. He seems to regard the Jesus Seminar as the best source of speculation about the historical Jesus. He writes about Paul as though he'd never heard of Jewish apocalypticism. Gnosticism has been one of the most exciting areas of recent discussions, and Levinson writes merely, "Paul was not the only person to expound upon Jesus' teaching at this time, however, and several different sects wre formed, including some involving mysticism." And that's it; who is he talking about? Both inadequate and uninformative.

I had planned to read straight through the book, but at this point I started skipping around. On almost any topic that I knew about--for instance Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism--the coverage was so spotty that I almost have to call it inaccurate, and certainly inadequate. He writes the history of Judaism, skipping from Masada to 1492. With that kind of record, how can I trust the entries on topics I don't know about?

I'm sure that a lot of the information in the book is accurate: I have to admit that the entry on Eastern Orthodoxy wasn't terrible. But it's so spotty that I will only reluctantly even refer to it, and never trust it entirely.

I suspect that the "Harper-Collins Dictionary of Religion" would be better, and I hope to get around to checking it out eventually. If you are looking for a book like this, I recommend starting there instead.