By Paul A. Djupe

I am proud to announce that articles from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Politics & Religion are starting to appear online. As coeditor-in-chief with Mark Rozell (George Mason University) and Ted Jelen (UNLV), we assembled a great team of associate editors (listed below) and have recruited over 100 authors from across the world to write over 100 articles representing the major lines of inquiry in religion and politics. We begin with a set of organizing essays that explore the macro theories involving religion and politics including secularization, the role of religious pluralism, Huntington’s clash of civilizations, the sacred canopy approach, and others. These should be thought of as questions rather than answers, of course. While these works will not appear in every single entry in the work, these do generally capture the spirit of the volume that connects the variable presence of religious diversity, conflict, cooperation and legitimacy, and the state.

There is no doubt that this represents the most comprehensive depiction of scholarship to date in our subfield. This tremendous resource should serve to fuel innovation in the field as there is no excuse for reinventing the wheel – getting up to speed in a research area should prove far less daunting given this collection.

At any point you can use this link to see what articles have appeared online. To date, these five articles have appeared online and the pace of posting should pick up:

• Gender and Religiosity in the United States. [Currently FREE] by Mirya R. Holman and Erica Podrazik
• Government Legitimacy and Religion. by Michael Hoffman
• The Political Opportunity Structure and Religion. by Luis Felipe Mantilla
• Non-Governmental Organizations: Bread for the World, Inc. by Erica Ashbaugh and Gary A. Goreham
• The Political Role of the Catholic Hierarchy: A Structural Analysis. by Timothy A. Byrnes

The volume (yes, it will be published as a set sometime in 2019 or early 2020), includes articles covering big questions and particular cases in the following areas (in which “religion and” is implied):

Macro-theories (e.g., secularization, clash of civilizations, liberalism, religious traditions)

Religious regulation and favoritism (overviews and in specific countries)

Conflict and war (e.g., civil war, war, terrorism, Boko Haram, post-conflict processes)

Movements (e.g., Gulen movement, religious grievances, Catholic Church and the Affordable Care Act)

Parties (e.g., inclusion-moderation, BJP, Republican Party, the AKP)

Political behavior (e.g., religious commitment approach, social networks, electoral choice in a variety of countries, protest, and religious elite behavior)

Public opinion (e.g., authority/authoritarianism, persuasion, sexuality, political tolerance)

We’ve been working with an outstanding team of associate editors, almost all of whom are also contributors to the project:

Gizem Arikan, Trinity College Dublin

Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Taylor Boas, Boston University

Steven Kettell, University of Warwick

Amy Erica Smith, Iowa State University

Güneş Murat Tezcür, University of Central Florida

Paul A. Djupe, Denison University Political Science, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog (see his list of posts). Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.