The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature ed. by George Thomas Kurian and James D. Smith III (review)

ill considered. Pearce seems to ignore the rudiments of his own moral theology, for example, when he speaks indifferently of either the ‘‘natural negativity’’ or the ‘‘sinfulness’’ of the trolls (22). Such muddling of categories is compounded in the discussion of Smaug’s significance mentioned above, or when Pearce suggests that Gandalf’s uncanny insight is ‘‘conducive to our understanding of angelic power’’ and concludes that Gandalf is ‘‘a guardian angel’’ (53). This last reading becomes still murkier, as Pearce spends considerable time attempting to establish the ‘‘Franciscan simplicity’’ of the warrior chieftain Beorn before delivering the puzzling observation that Beorn ‘‘seems to emerge almost as a metaphor of Gandalf’s role in the story as a father-figure and as a guardian of Bilbo and the dwarves’’ (56). Even layering this description with ‘‘seems’’ and ‘‘almost,’’ and calling it an ‘‘enigmatic dimension’’ for good measure, cannot prevent the reader from finding it abstruse at best. With all of these frustrating distractions, digressions, and critical misprisions, it would be easy to simply cast the book aside. This would be a mistake, however. Pearce has set out to do service to the world of fledgling Tolkien enthusiasts, likely a mixture of those rediscovering old literary pleasures and those encountering these stories for the first time through the movies. Experienced readers of Tolkien will find Pearce’s confusing and inconsistent appreciation of the great Oxford don’s fantastic oeuvre flawed at best, and will wonder why Pearce never takes the measure of the fact that Tolkien had been working on The Silmarillion for years before publishing The Hobbit. Religion and literature scholars will be put off by Pearce’s garbled understanding of allegory and his abuse of genre conventions. For many a moviegoer, however, or many a non-specialist who remembers Tolkien’s work from a first reading deep in the long-ago, Bilbo’s Journey will stir up excitement about the vision of growth in virtue implicit in Tolkien’s work. Such readers may well be influenced for the good by Pearce’s warm words about friendship with God, about the friendships formed in the pilgrimage of life, and about the inescapable necessity of growing in wisdom and virtue if we are to escape the clutches of vice and be cured of our ‘‘dragon-sickness.’’ Pearce is, after all, essentially right about these things; and he represents them with infectious enthusiasm. Peter G. Epps Oklahoma State University at Stillwater George Thomas Kurian and James D. Smith III (eds). The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature. 2 Vols. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Pp. vii711 . ISBN 978-0-8106-6987-5. $189.00. This encyclopedia, edited by George Thomas Kurian, president of the Encyclopedia Society, and coedited by James D. Smith III, professor at Bethel Seminary, is a helpful resource for Christian readers across all genres. In his introduction , Kurian claims this work fills a gap, for there is no other desk reference for Christian literature of all genres from the first century to the twenty-first century, 126 Christianity & Literature 64(1) and no encyclopedia has attempted to catalog and define Christian literature representing all denominations and coming from all parts of the globe. Because no similar encyclopedia exists, this work is also ‘‘an attempt to identify the canon of Christian literature’’ (xv). For the most part, the authors covered are or were professing Christians, and although the focus is mainly on nonfiction, literary works are fairly represented as well. The first section of volume I is devoted to entries on various genres and types of Christian literature. Such topics as apologetics, church history, and liturgies rub shoulders with gender literature, poetry, and conversion literature. Biographical entries make up the rest of volume I and all of volume II. While some of these entries cover figures as well known as Dante Alighieri or Martin Luther, other entries cover lesser-known authors like Hroswitha of Gandersheim, a female medieval playwright and poet, or Ching-Ching, an 8th-century Nestorian missionary-scholar in China. Unlike other encyclopedias of literature, which may contain entries united by time period or locale, this encyclopedia includes a truly notable array of both topics and...