Religion

Religion, as a category of literature, is enormous and difficult to summarize. It includes sacred texts from most major world traditions; philosophical writing about religious experience; theological arguments developed over centuries; and comparative studies of the ways different cultures have organized their beliefs about the sacred. What connects the works on the Book Renzo religion shelf is that all of them treat religion seriously as a subject worth thinking carefully about — whether they are approaching it from inside a specific faith tradition or from outside it, as observers.

Two works currently anchor the shelf.

The first is William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, delivered originally as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-1902 and published shortly afterward. James was one of the founders of American psychology and one of the most influential philosophers of his generation, and this book represents his attempt to take religious experience seriously as a psychological phenomenon — to study, empirically and sympathetically, what actually happens to people who have what they describe as encounters with the sacred. James's approach is unusual for its time in that it neither dismisses religious experience as delusion nor argues for the truth of any particular tradition. Instead, he treats the experiences themselves as the primary evidence, and asks what they can tell us about the human mind. The book remains foundational reading in the psychology of religion.

The second is James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 and expanded across multiple editions afterward. Frazer's project was ambitious to the point of eccentricity: to trace, through massive comparative research, the evolution of human religious belief from what he called "magic" through "religion" toward what he considered the beginnings of scientific thought. Modern anthropologists have complicated many of Frazer's specific arguments, and his framework is now regarded as more of a historical artifact than a working theory. But The Golden Bough was one of the most influential books on the study of religion ever written in English, and its treatment of comparative mythology influenced generations of writers — including T.S. Eliot, whose long poem The Waste Land explicitly cites Frazer as a source.

Religion in the public domain covers most of the great sacred texts and theological writing produced before the twentieth century. We're continuing to expand this shelf toward more of it. Every book here is a verified public-domain text. Start reading.