F.E. Peters, now an emeritus professor at New York University, is one of the greatest scholars of comparative religion in the United States. His works on Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are lucid, fair, and helpful, especially for scholars new to the field who are looking for a place to start. Years ago, I got a copy of his monograph, Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians, from the St. John’s University library and have never returned it! Friends of mine who have taken classes with him say he is a great teacher as well.

This month, Princeton University Press is releasing a new edition of Peters’s The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is surely worth reading, if one is at all interested in the subject (and one should be). Here’s the description from the Princeton website:

F.E. Peters, a scholar without peer in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revisits his pioneering work. Peters has rethought and thoroughly rewritten his classic The Children of Abraham for a new generation of readers-at a time when the understanding of these three religious traditions has taken on a new and critical urgency.

He began writing about all three faiths in the 1970s, long before it was fashionable to treat Islam in the context of Judaism and Christianity, or to align all three for a family portrait. In this updated edition, he lays out the similarities and differences of the three religious siblings with great clarity and succinctness and with that same remarkable objectivity that is the hallmark of all the author’s work.

Peters traces the three faiths from the sixth century B.C., when the Jews returned to Palestine from exile in Babylonia, to the time in the Middle Ages when they approached their present form. He points out that all three faith groups, whom the Muslims themselves refer to as “People of the Book,” share much common ground. Most notably, each embraces the practice of worshipping a God who intervenes in history on behalf of His people.

The book’s text is direct and accessible with thorough and nuanced discussions of each of the three religions. Footnotes provide the reader with expert guidance into the highly complex issues that lie between every line of this stunning edition of The Children of Abraham. Complete with a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition presents this landmark study to a new generation of readers.