The Concise encyclopedia of language and religion is distilled from the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, published in ten volumes in 1994. In their preface, editors John F. A. Sawyer and J. M.Y. Simpson note that more than 110 new articles have been written for this concise edition, presumably to shift the focus from language alone to the nexus of language and religion. Unfortunately, the book reads like a philological encyclopedia that has seen a monk scribbling in the margins, adding “religion” bits copiously but not integrating them fully into the corpus on language.