68 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

The Religion and Theology Student Writer’s Manual and Reader’s Guide

Hopko, Joel, Gregory M. Scott, and Stephen M. Garrison. The Religion and Theology Student Writer’s Manual and Reader’s Guide. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 195pp. $34.00. ISBN 978-1538100943.

Gregory M. Scott and Stephen M. Garrison have written a number of student writer’s manuals, though this volume is their first foray into religion and theology. In 1995 they published The Political Science Student Writer’s Manual bringing together the experience of Scott as Professor (now emeritus) of Political Science and Garrison as Professor of English and Creative Writing (both from the University of Central Oklahoma). The retitled The Political Science Student Writer’s Manual and Reader’s Guide is now in its 8 th edition (2016). Subsequently they have addressed other disciplines, bringing in subject specialists to coauthor with them. The current publisher has available their manuals in sociology (2016), psychology (2018), and philosophy (2017), although previous endeavors have also covered other disciplines. For their religion and theology manual, they have collaborated with Joel Hopko, coordinator of the Jornada de Fe for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. Hopko is also the Region XIII representative of the National Association for Lay Ministry.

This book consists of four parts divided into twelve chapters, with a target audience of undergraduate students (vii) and, to a lesser extent, their instructors (ix). The first part focuses on reading and writing in introductory religion and theology courses, and the second seeks to build on the first in developing scholarly skills. Part three considers some dimensions of the study of religion, and part four envisions a pivot to theology, the study of scriptures, and homiletics and liturgics. The parts are not equal in length or depth, with the first comprising half the work (103 pages) and the other three being 37, 23, and 18 pages, respectively. The work includes both brief (iii) and detailed (iv-vii) tables of contents, a glossary of religious and theological terms (184-7), a reference list (188-90), and an index (191-5).

The book includes forty-four “Read & Write” exercises, one for each chapter subsection. These exercises range widely from the relatively brief and manageable to the surprisingly long and complex. “Freewrite” (31) and “Correct a Sentence Fragment” (45), for example, are brief and manageable tasks that students might even explore on their own. Most exercises in the volume, however, are much more expansive and complex assignments, with many requiring outside research and significant time. One particularly curious example is “Explore Doctrinal Options for the Separation of Church and State” (19, 20), in which students are asked to “find more information about Pastafarian doctrine on a variety of websites” and write an essay of up to ten pages considering what constitutes the establishment of religion and what qualifies as legitimate religion and religious doctrine. This is a fairly wide-ranging and complex task for just the fifth exercise a student reading this manual would encounter. While the overall plan of the book tries to scaffold learning, this strategy is not always consistent in application. The book repeats the idea that writing is the best method of learning (vii, 21), but without proper guidance, support, and evaluation, it is a stretch to imagine that many of these exercises will result in significant learning for students on their own.

The work is, at root, a writer’s manual, and the strengths of the book are the chapters on writing (Chapters 2 and 3), which give attention to motivation, an overview of the writing process, and detailed advice on mechanics, formatting, and citation. The advice is rigorous (“follow the directions in this manual exactly” [66]), cautionary (“language errors spread doubt like a virus” [44]), and detailed (“do not overuse semicolons” [59]).