Religion

Background Information

Journal Articles

Books

Sacred Texts

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Reference texts for overviews, definitions, general background

• Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Statistics, Atlases
  • The Ecole Initiative: Index Page An online Encyclopedia of Early Church History.
  • The Catholic Encyclopedia
  • Glossary for Judaism, Christianity, Islam
  • BBC World Service - Guide to Religions of the World
  • Adherents to faiths   A growing collection of over 45,000 adherent statistics and religious geography citations
  • American Religious Data Archive A gathering of quantitative data on American religious groups
  • Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
  • Jerusalem 3000: Three Millenia of History (with old maps of Jerusalem) from the University of Southern Maine
  • Islam - from the Arab Culture and Civilization website of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education
  • Introduction to Islam by M. Cherif Bassiouni and hosted by the Middle East Institute
  • International Religious Freedom Report from the U.S. State Department
  • United States Commission on Religious Freedom
• Bibliographies
  • Bibliographies for Theology, by Fr. William Harmless, S.J., Creighton University
  • Women and Judaism Reading List
  • Women in Religion - Bibliography [warning: this link requires downloading a very large file]
  • Review of Biblical Literature Online- Reviews of recent (last 5 years) books in Biblical Studies. Compiled by the Society of Biblical Literature.

JOURNAL ARTICLES (DATABASES)
Suggested databases to search for articles on your topic

• ATLA Religion Index
  • Searchable on computer via EBSCO - includes all years of the Index (1949-present)
• Humanities Index/Abstracts
  • Searchable on computer via EBSCO for 1984 - present
  • Earlier volumes available in printed form in the Main Periodicals
• Available online via CSA from 1965-present
• Arts & Humanities Search
  • Searchable via ISI Web of Knowledge (you have to click through a few steps: select ISI Web of Science, then 'Full Search' or 'Easy Search', then the Arts & Humanities section.) Covers 1975-present

BOOKS
The best way to find books on your topic is to search in the Library Catalog.  Once you find something of interest, you might also browse the stacks in that same location.  Generally:

• Books on religion are found in the Williston (Main) Library stacks on Level 1with the call numbers starting  BL - BX
• Reference books on religion will have the same call number (BL - BX), but reside in the Reference area and can not be signed out. 

SPECIAL RESOURCES - Sacred Texts

• Early Church Documents :  writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Patristic texts and other early Christian documents
• Bibles:  King James Bible,  Latin Vulgate Bible,  Revised Standard Version, or try the Bible Gateway for other versions.
  • A quick list of major English language versions of the Bible.
• The Dead Sea Scrolls
• Buddhist Books and Articles -- a "gopher" (file listings-not web pages) server containing Buddhist texts from many Buddhist disciplines. Or, see Access to Insight's archive of texts on Theravada Buddhism specifically.
• Hindu Scriptures and Texts:  from the Internet Sacred Texts Archive
• Compendium of Muslim Texts--from Univ. So. California. And The Holy Qur'an
• The Book of Mormon --Originally published by Joseph Smith in 1832.
• Internet Sacred Texts Archive  a compilation of sacred texts from many faiths
• Eikon:  a database of images for biblical studies (full access to many of these images is restricted to Yale Univ.)