For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about creating a comprehensive online theological resource.
Over the coming few years, scholars, religious leaders and interested lay people will have a new source for overviews of theological topics — a long-form, open-access, peer-reviewed and regularly updated online compendium, the St. Andrews Encyclopædia of Theology. The project, based at Scotland’s oldest and most prestigious university and initially funded with a four-and-a-half-year, £3.3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, will offer rigorous yet accessible articles on key theological topics, beginning with Christianity, Judaism and Islam and eventually expanding to cover other major religious traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism. The Encyclopædia will be modeled on its philosophical analogue, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which was launched in 1995 and today today features nearly 1,600 articles on philosophical topics as general as metaphysics and as specific as the concept of personhood in the Akan culture of present-day Ghana.
“For years the John Templeton Foundation has been interested in supporting the development of something like the Stanford Encyclopedia, but focused on theological topics and other examples of what Sir John Templeton termed ‘spiritual information’ — insights gained from individual and communal religious practices across cultures and history,” says Alex Arnold, the Templeton Foundation’s senior program officer for philosophy and theology. “With Brendon Wolfe, Steve Holmes and the team at St Andrews and elsewhere, we’ve found an excellent set of partners to create a resource with broad and lasting value for readers around the world.”