“All these I have refused to do,” Kurian said.
His letter announced a class action suit against Wiley-Blackwell will be filed on behalf of the ECC’s nearly 400 contributors. If successful, the suit will require Wiley-Blackwell to publish the book “as originally approved and printed, without change and without censorship of its Christian content, tone and character.”
Susan Spilka of Blackwell’s parent company John Wiley & Sons, Inc. responded to Kurian’s allegations in a statement, claiming that concern about the content of the ECC had been raised in November 2008 prior to publication. Blackwell stated that the review was prompted by concern for its “leading reputation as a publisher of high quality scholarly content.”
“In the course of reviewing the situation with the editorial board (many of whom had similar concerns to those raised by the contributors), we learned that few if any of the contributions to the Encyclopedia were reviewed by the editorial board members as required both by high standards of scholarship and our agreement with Mr. Kurian. Instead, they were only reviewed (if at all) by Mr. Kurian himself. We have therefore asked the appointed editorial board to review the work for scholarly integrity and accuracy prior to publication—the task they were originally recruited to perform-- and the majority of the board has accepted this appointment.”
It described as an allegation “completely without foundation” Kurian’s claim that the review is being driven by an “anti-Christian lobby determined to ‘de-Christianize’ and censor the Encyclopedia.”
“We are sure that you will understand that it would make no sense for us to sabotage a project to which we have committed long-term investment and resources, and which we think will be valuable addition to Christian scholarship.”
CNA spoke with Kurian by phone on Wednesday. He said the publisher received complaints about the ECC because it presented a “Christian worldview.”
He also confirmed that the charge that the ECC was “too Christian, too orthodox, too anti-secular and too anti-Muslim and not politically correct enough” was “the gist” of the complaints and not an original quotation of a critic.
Such complaints “happen all the time,” he claimed, saying changes are typically made in second editions.
“Instead of doing that, they went ahead and suspended publication, and they desired to pull thousands of copies before all were sent.
“This is a very high-handed action that has no place in any publishing community or in any university environment where you have freedom of expression.
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“The stand may not be popular with a certain segment of people but these things need to be heard.”
“More than 400 people worked on this for two years. To destroy that kind of work on the basis of complaint from four people seems contrary to the established traditions we have as a society,” he told CNA.
Kurian said it should be expected that the writers of an encyclopedia on Christianity would “look upon the positive things in Christianity rather than the negative things.”
“You don’t write a book on a subject when you are hardly interested in exploring it,” he added.
“To say that a Christian encyclopedia should not be Christian seems to me a contradiction in terms. I brought this project to Blackwell, not the other way around. We had discussed it, we defined what the encyclopedia would be and would try to achieve.”
After publishing, he said, “they had second or third thoughts.”