John Bellaimey

John Bellaimey is a native Detroiter, a full-time teacher and writer, and Episcopal priest. He's taught at Breck School in Minneapolis since 1989, when he and his family moved from Cambridge, MA. At Harvard, John received the M.Div degree in Religion and Secondary Education. Prior to that, he was Admissions Director at Friends School in Detroit and taught French. In addition, he has taught in Ghana, West Africa, graduated summa cum laude in Anthropology from Haverford College, and helped his father with his family's tube-fabrication business, Detroit Tube Products, which his sister now directs .

In this full color book, John explores twenty of the world’s religions from Hinduism to Rastafarianism, following Karen Armstrong’s developmental model of religion as a human cultural dimension.

Beginning with a section on the roots of the “tree of world religions,” Bellaimey considers the sources, preoccupations, dimensions, and meanings of human religion in our history.

He then surveys polytheistic religions like Maya, Norse, and Canaanite and the great shift Jaspers called the Axial Age. Axial sages like Socrates, Laozi, the Buddha, and the Hebrew Prophets moved religion from mostly-supernatural to mostly-humanistic, shifting the focus on God’s inscrutable Otherness to God’s increasing insistence on ethical behavior as the highest form of worship.

A section on the three monotheistic faiths of Abraham follows, and the book ends with a selection of newer faiths, such as Sikh, Baha’i, Ahmadiyya, and Latter-Day Saints.

First published in 2014 as a more permanent version of his 25-year high school world religions readings, the 2018 edition is completely revised with photographs from a year-long sabbatical journey to 22 countries during the 2016-2017 school year.

John's TED-Ed lessons include

The Hidden Meanings of Yin and Yang ( https://youtu.be/ezmR9Attpyc )

and The Five Major World Religions ( https://youtu.be/m6dCxo7t_aE )

John and his wife, the journalist and blogger Lynnell Mickelsen, have three grown sons and live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's also a language nerd, improvisational cook, and freestyle quilter.