Understanding World Religions: Audio Lectures: An Interdisciplinary Approach
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The Zondervan Biblical and Theological Lectures series provides a unique audio learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook's direct narration of a book's text, Understanding World Religions: Audio Lectures includes high quality live-recordings of college-level lectures that cover the important points from each subject as well as relevant material from other sources.
Globalization and high-speed communication put twenty-first century people in contact with adherents to a wide variety of world religions, but usually valuable knowledge of these other traditions is limited at best. On the one hand, religious stereotypes abound, hampering a serious exploration of unfamiliar philosophies and practices. On the other hand, the popular idea that all religions lead to the same God or the same moral life fails to account for the distinctive origins and radically different teachings found across the world's many religions.
Understanding World Religions: Audio Lectures explores various religions under the broad categories of African Religions, the Yogic Traditions (including Buddhism), and the Abrahamic traditions.
These lectures present religion as a complex and intriguing matrix of history, philosophy, culture, beliefs, and practices. With the understanding that a certain degree of objectivity and critique is inherent in the study of religion, Hexham guides listeners in responsible ways of carrying this out. Of particular note is Hexham's inclusion of African religions, which have frequently been absent from major religion texts. He surveys these in addition to varieties of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Useful for formal students and independent learners alike, Understanding World Religions: Audio Lectures provides an accessible introduction for anyone wanting to better understand the world's many religions and the people who follow them.
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Irving Hexham is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary and adjunct professor of World Christianity at Liverpool Hope University. He has published twenty-seven academic books, including The Concise Dictionary of Religion, Understanding Cults and New Religions, and Religion and Economic Thought, plus eighty major academic articles and chapters in books, numerous popular articles, and book reviews. Recently he completed a report for the United Nations’ refugee agency on religious conflict in Africa and another for the Canadian Government’s Department of Canadian Heritage on Religious Publications in Canada. He is listed in Who’s Who in Canada and various scholarly directories. In 2008, he was honored at the historic Humboldt University in Berlin with a Festschrift, Border Crossings: Explorations of an Interdisciplinary Historian (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag).
