Word: piepkorn
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Profiles in Belief by Arthur C. Piepkorn (Harper & Row, 4 vols.). When all seven volumes are out, the late Lutheran theologian will have described exactly and elegantly the tenets of 735 different U.S. faiths...
...standard Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches lists only 296 denominations. Lutheran Theologian Arthur C. Piepkorn tracked down 735 North American groups for his Profiles in Belief (Harper & Row is up to Volume IV of this posthumous seven-volume work). Now comes J. Gordon Melton's encyclopedia listing 1,187 "primary" denominations in the U.S., which makes him America's champion church hunter...
Some people collect coins, others butterflies. Arthur C. Piepkorn collected religious denominations, large and small, and if there were contests in such things, he would have been world champion. It all began when he taught a survey course on religious bodies at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and ripened into an obsession when the book house of his own denomination, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, asked him to redo its standard reference work in the field...
That book surveyed 50 categories of denominations; another described 231 U.S. groups. The current Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches lists 328. The meticulous Professor Piepkorn wanted to go beyond this and catalogue for the first time the beliefs of each denomination in existence. Over nine years he classified a staggering total of 735 North American religious bodies...
...Piepkorn suddenly died of a heart attack in 1973 at age 66, leaving behind 2,900 pages of manuscript and a file-crammed study. His friend, Concordia President John Tietjen, undertook to edit the project for publication. Soon Tietjen was ousted in the Missouri Synod's ongoing doctrinal war, and only three years later is the first of a projected seven Piepkorn volumes reaching print. The initial installment of Profiles in Belief: The Religious Bodies of the United States and Canada (Harper & Row; 324 pages; $15.95) covers Roman Catholicism, 48 Eastern churches, and 18 groups related...