Okay, I love the concept - a collection of primary sources around a given topic - but I do not love that, while the topic on the cover is Religion, the first fifty pages are all explanations of why religion is the worst. I've started dreading trying to read this, so instead I'm giving up. ( )

Religion has a few highlights. An excerpt from Gianfrancesco Straparola's The Nights of Straparola (1553) is an entertaining story about an evil land-lord who on his death-bed commands the souls of his helpers to the devil. Straparola is a mix of Boccaccio and Charles Perrault, he inspired Shakespeare, and was the first to write down "The Puss in the Boots" and "Beauty and the Beast," among other fairy tales. Emile Zola in "Priests and Sinners" (1870) gives a good account of a rural Breton priest who rules over his illiterate and superstitious parish with a measure of religious certainty while standing by and watching a devil-possessed girl die of sickness in bed. Jorge Luis Borges in an excerpt from "The Gospel According to Mark" tells a twisted tale involving an educated city-boy who works in a rural farm and teaches the illiterate workers about religion, only to find they have taken his word too literally.

Jon Krakauer's excerpt from Under the Banner of Heaven (1982) is a wonderful character portrait of a radical right wing conservative religious Mormon who takes the word of God to the highest level - against the US Government. The excerpt from Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State (1896) is pretty cool as the first documented vision of an Israeli state for the Jews.

The four original essays are pretty good, my favorite is by Warren Breckman called "Secular Revival" in which he sees the world as becoming more religious, secularism is on the wane. He calls for a revival of secularism, not by the harsh and shrill argumentation of Dawkins and other 'God is dead' types, but by appealing to peoples needs through the bottomless soul of literature, the mysteries of nature and science and other aesthetics. ( )