Review of Irving Hexham's UNDERSTANDING WORLD RELIGIONS by Patrick Ehmann

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5 Eylül 2012 Çarşamba

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Interkulturelle Theologie. Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, (2012).

Leipzig, 39:3, 353-355

Review

Irving Hexham, Understanding World Religions: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Grand Rapids: Zondervan 2011, pp. 512, US $ 39.99.

With Understanding World Religions Irving Hexham has produced a well-founded and critical 500 pages introduction to the great religious traditions. The innovative approach provides religious studies students with a particularly interesting, easy to read work, that will also attract interested non-specialists. Thanks to extensive illustrations, the volume delivers a comprehensive impression of the diverse traditions that it discusses. It is unfortunate that there is as yet no German translation.

Irving Hexham is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary in Canada. His research concentrates on new religious movements, worldwide Christianity, and political religions in Germany. Consequently, he has close ties to Germany where he was honored with a Festschrift at the Theological Faculty of Berlin’s Humboldt University for his 65^thbirthday in 2008. Moreover, he is a founding member of the Berlin Society for Mission History.

Hexham approaches Religions Studies by differentiating between three broad traditions. These are the African, the Yogic, and the Abrahamic to each of which he devotes a separate section of the book. At the beginning of the book he provides a practical introduction to the science of religion or the pursuit of "Studying Religion." There it becomes clear how he conceptualizes the study of religion: he regards Religious Studies as an academic field – not as a discipline. It is an academic field because the study of religions requires the use of manifold methods.

His approach is fully realized in the chapters covering specific content. Thus he begins each chapter by first presenting the historical developments, which he then links to the present by using sociological and anthropological perspectives. In this way he realizes the challenge of the book’s title, namely, to understand world religions comprehensively. Further, as is made clear by the informative use of illustrations, direct sensory and experiential impressions are also important to Hexham.

A unique and exemplary aspect of the book is the inclusion for each religion of an influential thinker. At first glance the choice of Isaiah Shembe, Mahatma Gandhi, Edward Conze, Martin Buber, Abraham Kuyper and Sayyid Qutb may strike the reader as eclectic. It is unusual. But on reflection what links all thinkers is that they are either strongly shaped intellectually or that they had an impact beyond the religious milieu. Usually both apply. Consequently it becomes clear – and this is particularly important for young students – that religious thought worlds can only be understood when they are contextualized. Noticeable is that religions – including those in the past – always developed under the influence of other religious traditions and in exchange with them.

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Particularly noteworthy is the more exhaustive treatment of African religious traditions. Hexham offers a precise view of their basic patterns and core aspects. He emphasizes that until recently the study of world-wide religious traditions have suffered from a Western perspective that paid little attention to African religions. Unfortunately, and in light of the title of this work, the author could have shown where and to what extent African religious traditions might have had a global impact. The volume provides many maps showing paths of distribution and current spread of many religions, the diffusion of African Religions especially to the Caribbean area and South America however is not even mentioned. Perhaps this neglect has to do with the fact that Hexham is basically focused on southern African traditions ignoring the significance of western African developments. Just so the more limited spread of smaller traditions (Jainism, the religion of the Sikhs, and Confucianism) may be the reason for their shorter treatment. Here too it would have been interesting to investigate further the many interactions between various religions in the Indian Ocean region.

On the positive side it must be stressed that the author does not try to squeeze the traditions discussed in the book into a pre-determined pattern along the lines of: "How does religion X regard ethics, God, or creation?” Avoiding phenomenological presuppositions, he endeavors to provide an understanding that emerges from within each religion. Consequently, the difference with other concepts of interpretation and representation of religions becomes visible, for example, the difference with the description in the volume Religions Today (Religionen der Gegenwart) by Monika and Udo Tworuschka (Münster 2011).

Understanding World Religions is more than just the umpteenth introduction to the great religious traditions. With this work Hexham encourages the reader to think about religion, especially because he offers – in a positive sense – a detached and objective analysis that clearly identifies the problems and weaknesses of each tradition. One might complain that smaller religious traditions that also spread across the world are somewhat ignored. The firmness and attractiveness of Hexham’s approach to understand religious traditions as contextualized and interdependent quantities would have been particularly meaningful here. It would have meant, however, that the size of the already large book would have been further inflated, which makes it understandable that the author abjured realizing that task.

Patrick Ehmann

Bibliography:

Udo Tworuschka and Monika Tworuschka. (2011). Religionen der Gegenwart. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag.

Ehmann’s Review is translated by:

Karla Poewe
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