BOOKS: Sacred Database

"The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion," Jonathan Z. Smith, general editor, and William Scott Green, associate editor, with the American Academy of Religion (HarperSanFrancisco, 1,154 pp.; $45, hardcover). Reviewed by John Wilson.

Having spent a sizable chunk of my adult life engaged in the making of reference books, I've often wondered how and why (and how much) people use them. Like a presidential commission, after many years of study I have come up with some mostly unsurprising conclusions--for instance, that readers who actually consult reference books (as opposed to merely possessing them) tend to do so frequently. "Looking it up" becomes a habit, and if you've had occasion to pull down your copy of "The Oxford Companion to the Law" today, there is a good chance you'll be reaching for John Clute's "Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia or Fowler's Modern English Usage" tomorrow.

If you are of that tribe, you will want to add "The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion" to your reference library. (It has already won a place in the cramped quarters of ct's office library, where there is a fierce Darwinian struggle for shelf-space.) General editor Jonathan Z. Smith, associate editor William Scott Green, and ten area editors, all appointed by the American Academy of Religion, headed an international team of more than 300 scholars. Together they have produced a volume that consists primarily of concise ready-reference entries, with a generous sprinkling of longer entries and ten full-fledged essays, one for each major subject area: Religions of Antiquity (Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley); Christianity (Lawrence S. Cunningham); Religions of China, Japan, and Korea (Gary L. Ebersole); Buddhism (Malcolm David Eckel); Religions of Traditional Peoples (Sam D. Gill); Religions of India (Alf Hiltebeitel); Islam (Richard C. Martin); New Religions (Carole A. Myscofski), an area that receives special emphasis; and The Study of Religion (Hans H. Penner).

Any such project draws on an enormous range of scholarly expertise and demands substantive assessment at the same level. Herewith one reader's first impressions: I was grateful for the reader-friendly pronunciation guides that accompany many entries. Compiling such guides is a daunting task, in part because of the inevitable messiness of the enterprise (both in transliteration and in marking pronunciation with accuracy and yet accessibility). As a result, many reference works simply shirk the job altogether, leaving readers to their own devices.

The editors are no doubt already compiling a list of omissions and errors to be rectified in the next (electronic?) edition of the dictionary. For instance, there should be an entry for Gemara (the larger part of the Talmud, consisting of commentaries on the Mishnah); the term is defined here in the entry for Talmud but is not listed separately. The entry for dispensationalism is too brief to be really useful (a recurring problem; these are "token" entries). Moreover, rather than describing premillennialism as "the most noted form of dispensationalism," it would be more accurate to describe dispensationalism as a form of premillennialism. One could go on in this vein; with more than 3,200 entries in the span of some 1,150 pages, every reader will find nits to pick.

In the dictionary as a whole, there is a striking tension between two of the dominant trends in the academic study of religion. On the one hand, there is the ideal of scrupulous neutrality, embodied for example in the entry for clitoridectomy, "the ritual removal of the clitoris, less frequently of the labia, from the vagina. In some traditions it forms a central part of women's rites of passage and is considered a prerequisite to marriage." Note that the entry does not even report (without endorsing or condemning) the growing international outcry over this practice. This "non-judgmental" approach characterizes the bulk of the entries.

On the other hand, there is a good deal of explicit moralizing against the evils of Eurocentrism. Thus the reader of the entry for revitalization movements is instructed to avoid that term, the currency of which "in the mid-twentieth century" is attributed to "simple xenophobia, expressed in disdain for nonwhite cultures and their rejection of Eurocentric values or Christianity."

The essays by the ten area editors will probably not be used much by rank-and-file readers, but they will repay the attention of those who do read them; they suggest the ways in which leading scholars of religion are nowadays conceptualizing their field. (Hans Penner, for example, briskly dismisses the notion that academic study of religion might be informed by recognition of the reality of the sacred.) The ten are a mixed bag. Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley on Religions of Antiquity offers the most lively, witty piece of the lot (albeit laced with an unconcealed animus against Christianity); in its tone and angle of attack, it differs sharply from all the others, which tend toward the plodding.

Near the end of Lawrence Cunningham's fine essay on Christianity, there are three sentences that could be addressed to the reader who has just closed this dictionary, dizzied by the varieties of religious experience reflected in its pages:

As a total phenomenon, Christianity seems so complex in its history and practice one can forget that, at its core, Christianity is based on a simple premise. Christianity asserts that human beings exist in a state of alienation; that alienation (from each other, from God) has been healed through the life and saving deeds of a single person, Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity, then, has at its heart not an idea but a person.

A tour through this admirably prepared volume brings home both the extraordinary audacity and the hopefulness of the claims we affirm about that person, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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