Religion

Background Information

Journal Articles

Books

Sacred Texts

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Reference texts for overviews, definitions, general background

• General-Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Statistics, Atlases
  • 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
  • International Religious Freedom Report from the U.S. State Department
• Focused-Encylopedias, Dictionaries, Atlases, etc.
  • Encyclopaedia Judaica - online in GaleVirtual Reference Library
    in print:  MH Main Reference DS102.8 .E496 2007
  • Encyclopedia of Buddhism - online in GaleVirtual Reference Library
    in print:  MH Main Reference BQ128 .E617 2007
  • The Ecole Initiative: Index Page An online Encyclopedia of Early Church History.
  • The Catholic Encyclopedia
  • Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
  • Jerusalem 3000: Three Millenia of History (with old maps of Jerusalem) from the University of Southern Maine
  • Introduction to Islam by M. Cherif Bassiouni and hosted by the Middle East Institute
• 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 Database -  journal articles, essays, papers, and some books on topics such as biblical studies, world religions, church history, and religion in social issues.
  •  Index with links to full text in many cases. 
  • Covers publications from 1949-present.
• Arts & Humanities Search - a large database of journal articles covering a broad scope of humanities topics.  Note that A&H is a subset of the 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.)
  • Index with links to full text in many cases.
  • Covers journals published 1975-present
  • Offers the ability to search for cited references in addition to the normal search on author or topic
• Index Islamicus - literature on Islam, the Middle East and the Muslim world.
  • Includes works from journals, conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works and book reviews.
  • Coverage goes back to the early 1900's
• Philosophers Index - the major resource for scholarly articles in philosophy.
  • Index with links to full text in many cases.
  • Covers publications from 1940-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, or try the Bible Gateway for other versions.
• 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.
• For more sacred texts, see also:
  Internet Sacred Texts Archive  a compilation of sacred texts from many faiths
• Image database:
  Eikon:  a database of images for biblical studies (full access to many of these images is restricted to Yale Univ.)