Conclusion

Summary

Because this book was written in English, the two words that dominated were pleasure and joy. Joy was the interesting word, the one that can presumably teach us about religion and positive feelings. But joy is a fairly vague word, and besides, a great deal of the material comes from other languages. Can we learn something new about joy, even here, at the tail end of the book? Would it pay to look at the word in the languages of religious documents – Italian, French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Sanskrit? Translation is messy business, but it may be possible to pick gioia, joie, alegria, Freude, simha, or sukha. But this dictionary exercise is not very interesting and certainly not revealing. A better idea is going back to the sources.