Carolyn Pogue’s A World of Faith: Introducing Spiritual Traditions to Teens is a book that attempts to give overviews of nine major religions, including the goddess tradition, aboriginal spirituality, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Baha’i Faith, in a format that is appropriate for teens.

Each chapter starts with a questionnaire filled out by a teenager with information about their daily life, interests, and how their particular faith affects them. The interviews show how people belonging to these very different religions are actually quite similar to each other and to the reader. This book is a good starting place if you are looking to research a particular religion. Also, if you want a greater appreciation for other faiths, this may be a way to get an overview of each.

The main problem with the book is that it does not give a lot of credit to the intelligence of teens today. It attempts to make religions easy to understand, but in doing so, Pogue ends up oversimplifying many important facts, some to the point where key information is left out, or the given information is somewhat inaccurate. For example in the Judaism chapter, Pogue explains praying at the Western Wall by stating that “the first temple was built… rebuilt and destroyed. Today, one wall remains, and it is a place of prayer. It is called the Western Wall” (page 66). It makes things a lot easier to understand for non-Jewish people to simply say that the Western Wall is the only wall remaining of the temple, but this is actually incorrect. The Western Wall is not the last wall remaining, but Jews pray there because this wall is closest to the part of the old temple referred to as “the holy of holies,” which is the spot where it is believed that Abraham bound Isaac. This understandably is harder to explain if someone has no previous knowledge of the binding of Isaac and its biblical significance, but it is in fact the reason why Jews pray at the Western Wall.

The book is filled with illustrations and photographs, and is laid out very nicely, but the details and depth on important aspects of each religion seem to be lacking.

The intended reader is a young teenager looking for an overview of world religions and developing an understanding of how similar they are. I found the book to be boring because of its lack of depth, although I did think like its message of trying to convey similarities between religions. Overall this is a good beginning, but I definitely suggest that it not be the only text you read on the subject.