Revealing Religion

Revealing^® Religion offers students a compelling look at the nature of religion. Revealing Religion assumes no prior experience with or instruction in religion on the part of students, yet helps those who have had a strong religious education to approach the study of religion in a non-threatening way. Examples are drawn from a great variety of religious traditions, and topics of current interest including religion and violence, religion and gender, religion and environmentalism, neuroscientific accounts of religion, and atheism. Revealing^® Religion introduces concepts in a sequential fashion—defining religion, describing ways to study religion, exploring theology, psychology of religion, sociology of religion, phenomenology of religion, and anthropology of religion—but the modules can be assigned in whatever order the instructor prefers, as one module does not depend upon another.

Revealing^® Religion is designed to convey the maximum amount of information in the most user-friendly manner, and to reinforce learning with interactive exercises and a large bank of review questions. Compared to other introductory religion textbooks, Revealing^® Religion is vastly more experiential. Evocative images of religion in practice are presented at the rate of one for every hundred words of text, a ratio that print textbooks cannot begin to match. Contextually placed primary readings—myths from around the world, scriptures illustrating theodicy or religious ethics, and writings by key theorists of religion—lessen the need for adopting additional texts for your introduction to religion course. An extensive, linked, and easily searchable glossary defines key terms in the study of religion. The text is fully narrated, which is a tremendous asset for students with learning differences, auditory learners, and those whose native language is not English.

About the Author: Cynthia Eller, Ph.D.

Cynthia Eller has taught religious studies at Claremont Graduate University, Pitzer College, Claremont McKenna College, Montclair State University, Yale Divinity School, and Princeton University. She has written numerous books in the fields of women and religion, ethics, and women’s studies, including Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) and The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

Like all religious studies faculty, Dr. Eller hopes to draw her students into an appreciation of the elements of a wide swath of religions and instill a desire in her students to explore religion and its study further through upper-division classes. In Revealing World Religions and Revealing Religion, she has developed digital texts that convey basic concepts and subject matter, illustrate lived religion in a compelling way, and reinforce learning in ways unavailable with a printed text. These courseware titles are a new kind of textbook for a new generation of learners.