What's On Your Bookshelf?

I love reading, although I purchase books much quicker than I can consume them. Here's a snapshot of the books I have yet to read. I've read a couple of these but the majority I have yet to crack open.

From left to right:
Some of the following are out of view

• Sikh Religion [Not in view]
• Still Here, Ram Dass [Not in view]
• The Transcendent Unity of Religion, Frithjof Schuon [Not in view]
• Behold the Spirit, Alan Watts
• Taoist Tales, edited by Raymond Van Over
• Cloud-Hidden, Alan Watts
• The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff
• Guide to Yoga Meditation, Richard Hittleman 
• The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Joseph Chilton Pearce
• Bhagavad-Gita
• Who Needs God, Harold Kushner
• When Bad Things Happen to Good People*, Harold Kushner
• When Children Ask About God, Harold Kushner
• When All You Ever Want Is Never Enough, Harold Kushner
• Religion: A Humanist Interpretation, Raymond Firth
• Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time*, Marcus Borg
• Why Christianity Must Change Or Die, John Shelby Spong
• A New Christianity For A New World, John Shelby Spong
• Christianity's Dangerous Idea, Alister McGrath
• Who Killed Jesus, John Dominic Crossan
• The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade
• The First and Last Freedom, J. Krishnamurti 
• The Book**, Alan Watts
• The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark
• Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn
• The Secret Message of Jesus, Brian Mclaren
• Stages of Faith, James Fowler
• Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels
• How to Practice The Way to a Meaningful Life, H.H. Dalai Lama
• The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz
• Jesus For the Non-Religious, John Shelby Spong
• The Person of Christ*, Donald Macleod
• The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell [Not in view]
• Unity in Islam, Tallal Alie Turfe [Not in view]
• God: A Biography, Jack Miles [Not in view]
• The Bible, Karen Armstrong [Not in view]

* I've read
** I've read but would LOVE to reread.

I'm currently reading How Good Do We Have to Be?, by Harold Kushner and Orphans of the Sky, by Robert Heinlein. Although I should stick to reading one book at a time I enjoy switching between two books consisting of one religion and one sci-fi book. Unless it's a book on religion AND sci-fi, then my attention is focused on just one book. (I'm tempted to start reading Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell or Valis by Phillip K. Dick. They're just sitting there on my bookshelf, haunting me.)

So what's on your bookshelf? If you're a blogger I encourage you to post a picture of your bookshelf on your blog and share what's on your reading list. (I'm looking at you Don R. and Doug B.) Any suggestions what I should read next?

Religiously Illiterate America

Two new interesting Pew Forum studies have recently been released. The first is a really useful interactive graph which illustrates controversial battles over the building of 35 mosques in the U.S. in the past 2 years. Aziz over at City of Brass made an interesting point on the growth of mosque constructions. In 2000, there were 1200 Masjids (or Mosques) in the U.S., now there are roughly 1900 at a growth of 6% a year. If Muslims are taking over America they're pretty lousy at it.

 The second survey is disheartening. Atheists and agnostics are among the most religiously knowledgeable. Click here for the number breakdown. The internets is a buzz with this recent report. I'm a bit late jumping on the bandwagon but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents. The questions were simple, which is why I found the results so disappointing. Anyone who has taken a World Religions class at a community college could have answered all the questions correctly. Don't believe me? Then take the quiz to see where you stand in comparison with your fellow Americans. I haven't nor do I make it a habit of reading any evangelical blogs but I can guess their response to the survey. A "Who cares?" attitude about other faiths is exactly what caused Christians to score lower on the survey because they already know what they believe is true. What's worse is that roughly half of protestants could not correctly identify Martin Luther and his writings as inspiring the Reformation. I can understand walling yourself off from other religions to protect from "the taint" of their sinfulness, but missing questions about your own faith screams that we are less religiously literate than we actually portray ourselves.

I understand most people don't have the time to study other religions, unless that's what you do for a living or a hobby, but if anything this survey should be very humbling. There is a LOT we don't know about each other, a LOT. To assume that Muslims want to impose Sharia Law (thereby destroying the very religious freedom they have come to love and embrace as Americans) or that Buddhist worship themselves plays to our fears rooted in our lack of knowledge. We don't know anything about "Them" but this is what I've heard... We say we want to love our neighbor, but how can we love them without getting to know them? I am more concerned with removing fear and ignorance about our neighbor than with being religiously literate, BUT I believe this is only possible through educating ourselves. Sadly, most people of faith will only access material deemed acceptable by their religious view. A conservative Christian is more likely to read a book about Islam written by a fellow Christian than actually reading the Qur'an itself. Outsiders, then, are filtered through a water-downed perspective which often times scarcely resembles the original. This is why I avoid apologetic material of any religious cloth, apologetics exist only to defend their own point of view. Frankly, most people don't care to be religiously literate, but seeing that a good chunk of the world follows a certain religious view it's probably not a bad idea to pick up a $10 Intro to World Religions book.