In June, CQ Press released the new Encyclopedia of Religion in America, edited by Charles Lippy and Peter Williams. This four-volume, nearly 3,000 page work promises to be the new standard for reference works in American religion. Many of the essays are historical, but the encyclopedia is multidisciplinary. Most of the essays are the length of short to middling chapters. Very large historical topics, say Judaism, are usually divided into several essays, so the coverage is very detailed. As with most encyclopedias, the essays conclude with bibliographies of recent and classic scholarship, though the space allotted to bibliographies could have been more generous.
As an example of the high quality of the essays, see Chris Armstrong’s very fine essay on American fundamentalism since the 1970s.
List price for the encyclopedia is $600, and buying a copy from Amazon will set you back four Franklins. At that price, the encyclopedia is probably out of reach for many scholars and all graduate students, but you can always importune your local librarian to buy a copy (in print or digital).
On Chris Armstrong’s essay: He gives good enough explanations for how “fundamentalist” has come to be used with such complexity. But the paragraph on “those in the tradition of Carl McIntire and the Bob Joneses” still seems shallow. The descriptions in the paragraph certainly don’t all describe BJU itself.
I actually think that’s a pretty good summary of the more extreme wings of recent fundamentalism, so long as one understands those “in the tradition of Carl McIntire and the Bob Joneses” to include people like Jack Hyles, Peter Ruckman, Shelton Smith, John R. Rice. The individuals mentioned (McIntires and the Joneses) and the list of doctrines and practices are of course both lists of examples, and cannot be understood as correlating exactly. I take the incongruity less as a fault in the author’s understanding and more as one of the perils of writing a general encyclopedia article.