Recent Reference Books in Religion: A Guide for Students, Scholars, Researchers, Buyers & Readers

`Recent Reference Books in Religion' by University of Massachusetts Professor of History, William M. Johnston is that rare kind of book which you always wish you could find, but which seems to elude the best searches, and you end up stumbling over it by accident. This is a valuable book for those who use these resources, especially for small public and private libraries, which are not attached to colleges or universities where there are people who would know about such books. The book gets high marks for the accuracy of its title and subtitle, and the reader is admonished to take the title quite literally. What I mean is that this book is NOT limited to citations of Christian references. It is also, thankfully, not limited to works in English, although it does stay very close to the primary languages of scholarship of Western Europe, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, in roughly that order. This selection offers a wonderful example of how most of the very best encyclopedic and handbook style references are written by the Germans and the French, especially on religious subjects. Since Martin Luther, Bible scholarship has been a major academic industry in Germany. The subtitle also importantly indicates that this book will be valuable to anyone interested in studying religion, even if you do not intend to purchase many of these books. The reason for that is in the superb comparative evaluations of many of the reference works which have the same or overlapping subjects. A fine example of this is in the comparisons of the Harper Bible Dictionary, the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, and the Anchor Bible Dictionary. The first two are single volume references and the last is a six-volume work, where each of the volumes is as large as the Harper and the Eerdmans. But Johnston successfully shows that this does not automatically mean the Anchor is the best. The author points out that the Anchor editors concentrate on `just the facts', so theological discussions are weak at best. The Eerdmans, on the other hand, offers the reader the Protestant theological interpretation in many entries, reflecting the fact that it is a translation of a Dutch work. The `non-denominational' material is so good that a Catholic, for example, can easily overlook this fact, since the Protestant material is always presented in a special section at the end of articles. Johnston points out that Eerdmans is not without some weaknesses, but if you want a Bible dictionary you can carry around with you, this may be your best bet. These three works point up the fact that Johnston's book is obviously dated. It was copywrited in 1996, which is, I believe, the same year the Harper Bible Dictionary became the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, with important revisions; although I see that the criticisms of the older edition may still be relevant to the current edition. This being out of date appears in other, more significant places. The aging `Encyclopedia of Philosophy' which first ca