Happy Hanukkah to our community’s Jewish members!

As we welcome the feast of lights, we invite you to sample items from my personal saved list of books related to Hanukkah.

If you are seeking something heartwarming that chronicles the whole Jewish year, including Hanukkah, as well as one person’s journey from a Lutheran upbringing to Judaism, “check out” The Choosing: A Rabbi’s Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days.

According to the description, in The Choosing, the author “Andrea Myers fuses heartwarming anecdotes with rabbinic insights and humor to describe what it means to survive and flourish on your own terms…. With stories connected to each of the holidays, Myers draws on her unique path to the rabbinate-leaving behind her Christian upbringing, coming out as a lesbian, discovering Judaism in college, moving to Israel, converting, and returning to New York to become a rabbi, partner, and parent.”

Access, via Falvey Library, available here: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1713020/Description#tabnav.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Library.

By Darren G. Poley

The first three volumes of the Twentieth Century Religious Thought Library (Alexander Street Press) are collections of digitized texts by thinkers from the religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Access to these content collections allows you to trace key concepts of theology across texts by important modern writers as well as to be able to understand contemporary issues of interfaith dialogue and comparative religion.

You can explore individually each volume of the Twentieth Century Religious Thought Library. Volume I, Christianity brings together, for example, many of the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jürgen Moltmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Jon Sobrino, as well as the Gesamtausgabe, Kirchliche Dogmatik and other writings by Karl Barth.

Volume II, Islam includes works by Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Said Nursî, Rashid Rida, and Muḥammad T̤āhirulqādrī, as well as books in series like “Makers of the Muslim World” published 2005-2015.

Volume III, Judaism assembles materials from scholars such as Wilhelm Bacher, Heinrich Laible, Nathan Michael Gelber, and Siegfried Silberstein, as well as those in the Markus Brann Archive from the National Library of Israel.

At the collection level, you can browse or search authors and titles of works. You can also browse series or topically by subject. Advanced keyword searching and browsing by genres are even more ways to tap into a volume. Genres include letters, biographical works, scriptural commentaries, and political writings.

Darren G. Poley is Associate Director of Research Services and Scholarly Engagement, and Theology, Humanities & Classical Studies Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library. Every e-text in these collections is also accessible via Falvey’s online catalog: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Search.