Christianity among the Religions in the Encyclopedia of Religion

Extract

The place of Christianity in a work such as the Encyclopedia of Religion is an uncomfortable one. The work is, after all, largely the product of Western scholars operating in a culture now widely thought to have abandoned much of its Christian inheritance. How does one in such circumstances fulfil the editorial desire to be evenhanded, to treat all religious phenomena as far as possible ‘objectively’? By giving Fairies a longer entry than Cyril of Alexandria, for example? Or, to take a more serious example, by seeing to it that the Eastern church gains a fair proportion of space, thus giving Cyril I, patriarch, 1570/7–1638, more space than Cyril of Alexandria, theologian and bishop? Such points are an indication of the immense difficulty facing editors of a work such as this.