Religion in Five Minutes

Forthcoming 2026

The Religion in 5 Minutes series was launched in 2017 with the publication of the eponymous volume. By the end of 2025 will have published 9 volumes which altogether offer over 2800 pages and 676 discrete entries. New volumes —on Islam, New Religious Movements, Mormonism Jainism, among others — are planned for 2027 and 2028 and beginning in 2026, we will integrate the entire corpus into a single interactive online reference work which will continue to be updated as the new volumes are completed.

Reviews of Published Volumes

Reviews The best thing about this book is that it brings together the ideas and reflections of some of the world’s leading scholars on Buddhism. In terms of the legitimacy of the book, this is one of its greatest values. Buddhism in 5 Minutes serves as a stimulating exploration of Buddhism, and introduces Buddhist ideas in a valuable new way. The majority of the articles are exceptional.
Religions of South Asia

Buddhism in Five Minutes has much to recommend it. Harris has done a remarkable job of editing to ensure minimal repetition between chapters. The resulting volume will be a valuable resource for non-specialist readers seeking well-founded and highly readable responses to common questions about the Buddhist tradition.
Religion

[Indigenous Religious Tradtions in Five Minutes] is an important contribution and will prove useful in many contexts both within and outside of academia.
Critical Research on Religion

“Five Minutes” might suggest superficiality but in fact, though indeed most chapters might be read in five minutes, the concepts and problems they discuss easily lead to far longer contemplation. This is a thoroughly academic volume, though it spares the reader such things as footnotes and long citations of scholarly authorities. ... Each chapter is written by an expert, whose scholarly background and other publications are briefly appended to their respective chapters. The scholarship is international and diverse in every respect, and each chapter also concludes with suggestions for further reading. This book could well serve within a course introducing the Bible and biblical study to undergraduates. Its final chapters on gender–, postcolonial–, and reception criticism bring the volume well into the era of postmodern biblical scholarship.
The Bible Today

Religion in Five Minutes is an excellent collection of the questions so many people have but never dare to ask—journalists, policymakers, practitioners, and, yes, also students of religion. The answers given by well-known experts in the field are straight to the point, candid, and accessible. Browsing through this book will make readers eager to spend more than five minutes on the fascinating and enigmatic thing we call 'religion'. Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Religion in 5 Minutes presents a new way to gain a comprehensive grasp of the complex and fascinating field of Religious Studies. By answering 81 sincere and direct questions of students in short, eloquent texts devoid of jargon, the book makes decades of academic research and theory accessible to everyone. Here is a text that will not only be very useful to beginning students but will also help scholars and researchers explain their work more precisely and effectively.
Naomi Goldenberg, Professor of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa

At last! At last! The perfect resource [Religion in Five Minutes] I never dreamed of having in one convenient place has come along. I get dozens of these questions each time I teach a class, and now I have an informative, scholarly, reliable source that also happens to be thoroughly inviting to students. I plan to assign this book in both introductory and more advanced courses. This is hands down a ‘must-have’ for every Religious Studies department but, more importantly, every school, hospital or healthcare center, government office and definitely newsroom should have a copy on hand. Beautifully executed and brilliantly conceived, this is so much more than simply a handbook. Each article also provides a robust springboard into higher-level meta-conversations about why students are asking these particular questions and how and why they (and many others) frame ‘religion’ in the manner that they do.
Sarah McFarland Taylor, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Northwestern University

For those who want to know about Paganism today, as far in the round as it is possible swiftly to get, this book [Pagan Religions in Five Minutes] should be a first port of call.
From the Foreword by Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol