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.

By Darren G. Poley

Several guides are linked to the Theology & Religious Studies Subject Guide. One titled Bible Basics is designed to aid navigation of the sacred scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition and locating biblical commentaries in Falvey. Also listed is the Biblical Studies guide. On it there is a section called Advanced Research Tools. Among those tools are some which the Library has acquired and others which are open access.

Recently Falvey obtained many of the Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford University Press) which present peer-reviewed, annotated bibliographies and expert commentary on current scholarship in selected disciplines, including Biblical Studies. Two open access online resources which were recently added to the Biblical Studies guide are Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne – BiBIL (University of Lausanne) and BIBLindex (French Institute of Christian Sources).

Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne – BiBIL presents bibliographical data about books, monographs, serials, and journal articles on biblical and related studies. It has French, English, and German search interfaces. Materials cataloged are in a variety of languages. Often it has an abstract and occasionally a link to the full text.

BIBLindex provides a growing online inventory of biblical quotations and allusions, primarily from Early Greek and Latin Christian literature. Includes biblical texts written in both ancient and modern languages. The project goal is to create a searchable database of biblical quotations from all Christian literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (from the beginning of the Common Era until 1400). You must create a free user account in order to access the search function in BIBLindex.

Darren G. Poley is Associate Director of Research Services and Scholarly Engagement, and Theology, Humanities, and Classical Studies Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library. You can access these bibliographies from the Databases A-Z page on the Library Website.