Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion
by Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Megan Goodwin · Keeping It 101
Two religious studies professors spent seven seasons and over 100 episodes working through method, theory and individual traditions as a public version of an intro-to-religion syllabus. The show concluded in 2025; the full archive stays free.
More resources on World Religions Overview
The World’s Religions
Sympathetic survey of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and primal traditions, presenting each faith as its own adherents understand it. Readers come away able to state what each tradition claims about human purpose.
pluralism.org
Pluralism.org is the Harvard Pluralism Project’s online hub for understanding religious diversity, especially in the United States. It features profiles of religious communities, case studies, teaching materials, primers on world religions, and multimedia resources to explore how religion shapes society.
BBC Religions
Archived BBC reference covering twenty traditions - including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Shinto, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Rastafari, and atheism - with sections on beliefs, history, practices, ethics, and holy days for each, written for newcomers comparing faiths.
ReligionForBreakfast
Nonsectarian video essays on religious traditions, texts, rituals and the academic study of religion, typically 10-20 minutes. Episodes cite scholarly literature and deliberately avoid both devotional framing and anti-religious polemic. The rare YouTube channel on religion that is neither apologetics nor New Atheism - a credentialed scholar doing public religious studies. S
How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020
Pew Research Center's 2025 study estimating the size and distribution of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, other faiths and the religiously unaffiliated across 201 countries, built from more than 2,700 censuses and surveys, with interactive tables. A survey course teaches what traditions believe but rarely how many people actually hold them and where. This is the primary-source dataset behind almost every figure quoted elsewhere, free, downloadable, and neutral by construction. Reading it early inoculates a learner against inflated or stale numbers.
The World's Religions
The most widely read single-volume survey of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and primal religions. Smith presents each tradition through its own central teachings, sympathetically and at its best, across roughly 400 pages. The canonical narrative entry point - nothing else gives a newcomer a coherent, readable map of eight traditions in one volume. Known limitation: Smith is a perennialist who presents each faith at its most idealized.