I bought this book because I wanted to learn a lot about the different religions of the world so that I could use it as a starting point for possibly picking one for myself or at least disqualifying the ones that I know I couldn't follow. In other words, I was looking for a menu of religions that would give me summaries of what they believed. This book does not really provide this.

A lot of the entries talk about the organization and history of the religion itself and completely skipped talking about the beliefs. For example, the entry on Zen just says that it is a form of Mahayana Buddhism, says that adherents aim to suddenly achieve enlightenment, and then names two people who brought Zen Buddhism to America and a third individual who it says should not be associated with it. I would have liked to have seen it actually give me some of the core teachings as if a Zen monk was explaining to me what his religion was about.

To be fair, the author was upfront in the foreword about how he was writing this from an evangelical Christian perspective for other evangelicals, and it offers tips for evangelicals on how to deal with the people of the different religions to try to win them over. And to describe the book as "a guide to convert people to evangelical Christianity" would definitely be inaccurate since the author only included his personal thoughts and suggestions at the end of the entries and was very brief when he did, so it wasn't preachy or distracting for me. However, I wish this would have been stated more clearly in the actual description of the book instead of just in the foreword.

In spite of the book turning out to not be quite what I wanted, I still feel like I have gained at least a basic knowledge of a lot of the world's religions, which is definitely something I wanted. For that reason, I'm still happy I bought the book. ( )