Last week I stumbled on this nattily designed book in a store in Chelsea specializing in nattily designed things. I picked it up expecting to be disgusted by crassness and ignorance but was instead rapidly won over by subtle wit and intelligence. It's accurate, too, even where it's tongue in cheek. It's the work of a company in Venice (Los Angeles) called
Knock-Knock whose humor, the founder
explained to me (thank you, Facebook!), "is in the concept and the editing/ curating, but the execution is totally straight." Bingo! Modeled on
Consumer Reports-like guides to choosing cars and the like, it works brilliantly not only as a spoof on religion but as a mirror of the religious consumer and what scholars called the "voluntarist" tradition in American religion. But no scholar has offered so handy a synthesis of 99 religions (it probably helps to be in LA to find that many). Not to mention prefaced it with so user-friendly an account of varieties of "seeker" spirituality, and added, for those whom even these 99 leave uncertain, a guide to starting your own religion that actually makes business sense!
The Savvy Convert's Guide has a fold-out table which summarizes the page-long accounts
of the 99 religions, rated and compared with respect to
Sex Regulations,
Dietary Restrictions,
Time Commitment,
Cost,
Conversion Difficulty,
Afterlife Quality,
Traditional,
Rate of Growth,
Holidays, and
Aesthetics. I'm going to introduce this book to the students in Theorizing Religion this coming semester, right after I give them a chance to try out the
Belief-O-Matic - which, however, doesn't realize it's a spoof.
explained to me (thank you, Facebook!), "is in the concept and the editing/ curating, but the execution is totally straight." Bingo! Modeled on Consumer Reports-like guides to choosing cars and the like, it works brilliantly not only as a spoof on religion but as a mirror of the religious consumer and what scholars called the "voluntarist" tradition in American religion. But no scholar has offered so handy a synthesis of 99 religions (it probably helps to be in LA to find that many). Not to mention prefaced it with so user-friendly an account of varieties of "seeker" spirituality, and added, for those whom even these 99 leave uncertain, a guide to starting your own religion that actually makes business sense! The Savvy Convert's Guide has a fold-out table which summarizes the page-long accounts 
of the 99 religions, rated and compared with respect to Sex Regulations, Dietary Restrictions, Time Commitment, Cost, Conversion Difficulty, Afterlife Quality, Traditional, Rate of Growth, Holidays, and Aesthetics. I'm going to introduce this book to the students in Theorizing Religion this coming semester, right after I give them a chance to try out the Belief-O-Matic - which, however, doesn't realize it's a spoof.
