Legions of faiths girded for battle

Jack Miles has undertaken no less ambitious a project than writing a “biography” of God, winning a Pulitzer Prize in the bargain. But when the publisher W W Norton & Co.

 approached him nine years ago about serving as general editor of its inaugural edition of “The Norton Anthology of World Religions,” Miles, a former Jesuit seminarian, balked. While the timing seemed right, given the continuing post-September 11 hunger for inter-religious understanding, the task was dauntingly huge. “I didn’t think I knew enough,” Miles, a professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine, recalled recently. Still, he was persuaded, and now the anthology - featuring some 4,200 pages of texts spanning roughly 3,500 years - is here. 

The two-volume set, weighing in at over eight pounds and boxed in a slipcase decorated with a suggestively numinous but culturally non-specific swirl of colours, seems intended to become the go-to holiday gift book for the ecumenically minded. It’s also one of the most complex anthologies Norton has tackled and one that promises to start arguments with higher stakes than the squabbling surrounding another of its influential compendiums, “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” during the height of the canon wars. 

“There will be dust-ups,” said Julia Reidhead, the editorial director of Norton’s college division. “This was built from a secular point of view, but the orthodox from any tradition might look at various things and say, 'I don’t think so.'” 

The anthology, Norton emphasises, comes in peace, with the intent of letting the world’s six “major, living, international religions” – Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – deliver their wisdom “in their own words.” The selections, chosen by an expert in each tradition recruited by Miles, include foundational texts like the Bible, the Quran and the Rig Veda, along with responses and elaborations by preachers, theologians, missionaries, philosophers, poets, and even a hip-hop artist, RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, whose book the “Wu-Tang Manual” is excerpted in the Taoism section. 

Special attention was given to texts by and about women, from as many periods as possible, among them an excerpt from the autobiography of Jarena Lee (1783- circa 1849), one of America’s earliest known black female preachers, and a medieval Islamic tribute to pious Sufi women. There are also plenty of what Miles called “scandalous voices,” from dissidents like the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith to radical fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden to atheists like Bertrand Russell, whose 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” is excerpted. 

“We didn’t shy away from such voices,” Miles said. “Where they mattered within the tradition, we included them.” Reidhead admitted to having some “Will it sell in Texas?” moments (a reference to that state’s large college market): for example, when Wendy Doniger, the Hinduism editor, wanted to include a contemporary Dalit poem whose title puts God in a compromising position with his mother. 

“There are texts in all these traditions that are blasphemous,” Reidhead said. “But that was a case where I asked, 'Do we really need this?' ” The poem was dropped. But the sheer range of material in the anthology, some scholars say, stands as a rebuke to reductive caricatures, whether of Islam as “the mother lode of bad ideas,” as the writer Sam Harris recently put it, or Buddhism as simply a mindfulness practice. 

“This is an important project, and not just in the academy,” said Mark C Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, who was not involved with the anthology. “We desperately need for people from all walks of life to have a better understanding of these traditions.” 

The anthology, which will be broken into six tradition-specific paperbacks for the college market, lands at a moment of ripe commercial opportunity. Some 250,000 students in North America each year take broad religion survey courses, according to Norton’s analysis of textbook sales figures from the PubTrack database. 

But it also comes at a moment when religious studies is caught up in a continuing debate about its fundamental premises, starting with the term “religion” itself. In his introduction, Miles cites an anecdote about a forum hosted by the American Academy of Religion, where an effort to define the term - is it a matter of belief? Practice? Cultural and ethnic identity? - sent half the participants stomping out. 

More specifically, some scholars have questioned the notion of “world religions” as a Western construct originated by European scholars who “discovered” the East, transforming its dizzyingly complex practices into monolithic, text-based “-isms” resembling Christianity. Even today, such scholars argue, the field is haunted by an “undead Christian absolutism,” as Tomoko Masuzawa put it in her influential book “The Invention of World Religions” (2005). 

Masuzawa, as it happens, is married to Donald S Lopez Jr the editor of the anthology’s Buddhism section. “I have gotten a lot of grief about the issue at home,” Lopez, a professor at the University of Michigan, said with a laugh. But he said he hoped teachers would use the anthology itself, which opens with an essay by Miles discussing these debates, “to scrutinise the category.” 

Doniger’s book

Some sections may raise eyebrows among specialists. The Taoism section, for example, edited by James Robson of Harvard, pushes well beyond the once-standard division between “pure,” philosophical Taoism and “impure,” superstitious practice, putting philosophical classics like the Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi alongside texts relating to alchemy and body cultivation, not to mention works like “The Tao of Physics” and George Harrison’s “The Inner Light.” 

“Some scholars are going to be surprised at how wide I threw the net,” Robson said. Other selections will no doubt stoke debate far beyond academia. Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago, completed the Hinduism section before her latest legal battles with Hindu nationalists in India over her book “The Hindus: An Alternative History.” But she said she expected they would take similar offence at some of the heterodox selections in the anthology, which also includes an essay by nationalist writer Purushottam Nagesh Oak arguing that the Taj Mahal, built by Muslim Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, is really “a Hindu palace.”

 The essay, Doniger said, is “a sick joke.” She added, “But it’s part of a serious and very destructive faction in contemporary Hinduism.” Secularism has become a hot topic in academia, as scholars debate whether secularisation is defined by a defeat of faith, or by a multiplication of new religious and spiritual options. 

That question also hangs over the Christianity section (edited by Lawrence S Cunningham of Notre Dame), which ends with an excerpt from the American poet Christian Wiman’s memoir about converting from atheism to Christian practice, if not necessarily belief. That ambivalent, post-modern spirit undergirds the anthology, whose goal, Miles writes, “is not conversion, but exploration.”

 Still, he said he hopes readers might have moments like the one he had with the Heart Sutra, an early Buddhist text on nothingness. 

“For me,” he said, “reading it for the first time was an example of what happens when the student of religion stops being a student, and is caught sideways by something he wasn’t looking for.”