By Darren G. Poley

Falvey recently acquired online access to over 4,000 peer reviewed and curated articles in the subject area of religion, including the essays from over 100 Oxford Handbooks, all of which are discoverable in Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford University Press).

For over a decade Oxford Handbooks, a definitive collection of volumes in a variety of academic subjects published by Oxford University Press, have provided essays that survey the current state of scholarly debate and present an original argument about the future direction of research. The content of those volumes has been gathered in Oxford Handbooks Online, an article database which can be cross searched for original, peer-reviewed research reviews covering the key issues and exploring major debates in a growing number of disciplines.

A few advantages of Oxford Handbooks Online (OHO) are that it publishes online individual Handbook chapters prior to their release in print, significantly reducing the lag between when a chapter is written and peer reviewed, and when it is made available to researchers. It also includes online-only essays on emerging areas of research too new and too narrow to be included in a Handbook volume. Finally, Oxford can now at any point update individual articles, whether they originally appeared in a Handbook or were simply published online, and a full version history will be available so scholars can track those updates.

Some of the other subject areas to which Falvey has access in OHO are philosophy, history, political science, classical studies, and psychology.

Darren G. Poley is Associate Director of Research Services and Scholarly Engagement, and Theology, Humanities & Classical Studies Librarian at Falvey Memorial 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.

By Darren G. Poley

Are you looking for primary source materials of a religious or theological nature from the era of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Revival? Printed texts on many subjects burst onto the scene in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Western Europe. A wide variety of controversial, exegetical, pastoral, social and political works from that time have been gathered into two online collections: The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts and The Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation.

They present full-text historical documents, and both include an array of document types, such as pamphlets, sermons, compendia, catechisms, biblical commentaries, and doctrinal treatises.  Between them there is a broad representation of various denominational traditions and religious orders.

Period editions are presented in their original languages of Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. You can search by topic, author, biblical citation, or the original title of a work.

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 collections from the Databases A-Z page on the Library Website.