By John Logan 0 7502 1443 0 Hinduism By Dilip Kadodwala 0 7502 1444 9 Islam By Khadijah Knight 0 7502 1445 7 Judaism By Angela Wood 0 7502 1441 4 Sikhism By Kanwaljit Kaur-Singh 0 7502 1446 5 Wayland Pounds 9.50 each Age range 10-14

Chris Arthur welcomes a series of high-quality material which helps underline the extent to which we live on a religiously plural planet.

Taken together, these six books provide an extremely effective introduction to the world’s major faiths. While obviously geared to early secondary pupils, they are likely to appeal to a wider readership. Clearly written, superbly illustrated and attractively presented, the series is a high-quality addition to that important but still novel genre - material which tries to present religion in a way which neither proselytises, patronises nor pronounces judgment.

What makes the series particularly appealing is the way it shows the rich diversity of each religion. The authors are to be congratulated on the ease with which they move between ancient and modern aspects of each faith and how, with similar fluency, they introduce something of the range of geography and culture involved in the current manifestations of each tradition. Buddhist nuns being ordained in Britain, the igloo-like St Jude’s Cathedral in Iqualit, Canada, followers of the Hare Krishna movement dancing in the streets of Vladivostok, a mud-built mosque in Mali, a Yemeni family celebrating Pesach, the existence of many Sikh gurdwaras in America - including such, to most people, unexpected material helps to underline the extent to which we live on a religiously plural planet, where an understanding of the different faiths is essential to understand those around us.

Each book consists of an introduction and seven chapters. The first chapter in each book looks in broad outline at the story of the faith concerned, focusing on its history, key figures and basic teachings. Chapter two looks at how the religion spread and what its current presence is in the world (there are some excellent maps and timecharts). The third chapter is about scriptures. Home and family life, community life, and the life-cycle of an individual believer from birth to death provide the focus for chapters four to six. The final chapter looks at festivals. Each book has a reliable glossary, a well-chosen list of further reading (including both fiction and non-fiction) and a properly compiled index.

There are some minor points of criticism. It would have been useful to have included photographs of the individuals whose own experiences are recounted. This would have further helped the material to come alive and might have been a better use of space than the repeated decorative use of key religious symbols in the margins (whose significance is not always explained on first appearance). The section on stupas in Buddhism is too brief to be helpful; in Christianity the partial version given of the Nicene Creed and the rendering of the whole UK as “Anglican” may cause confusion; since the image of the Shiva Nataraja appears so frequently in Hinduism, more attention could have been given to explaining its symbolism; the chapter in Islam on The World of Islam would benefit from some re-working; the definition of Seder in Judaism would have been better incorporated into the text (andor put in the glossary), rather than appearing in the chart of festivals alone; given the repeated use of the character for “One God” in Gurmukhi script in Sikhism, this key aspect of the Mool Mantra needs to be better highlighted.

Substantially, though, these are very well-conceived volumes, written and produced to an admirably high standard. My main complaint is really a request for more. There should surely be a seventh book in the series - called Looking at World Religions. This would address some of the general aims, methods and problems of RE, explain the rationale for such a subject and say something about other forms of human religiousness outside the great faiths.

To ignore methodology may be tempting - but it also risks obscuring the reasons for doing a subject in the first place and the broader issues which are raised by such an endeavour.

Chris Arthur is a senior lecturer in the department of theology and religious studies at the university of Wales, Lampeter