Titles for Review
Theological Librarianship actively seeks scholars of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and career stages to review new works of interest to theology and/or religious studies subject specialists.
Below are titles for which we are currently soliciting reviews. Please click the title link for the volume that interests you to email the reviews editor. The reviews editor will then respond with further instructions.
If you are aware of a new title not appearing here that would be relevant for our readers, please email the editorial board.
Titles for Review (Updated June 2024)
Books at the Intersection of Librarianship and Theology/Religious Studies
Preservation of Collections in Theological Libraries
This volume introduces readers to the most important principles and practices for preserving library and archival collections. Through a combination of informational chapters and case studies, authors provide clear and practical advice on:
- Maximizing the longevity of physical materials that librarians and archivists commonly collect
- Maintaining appropriate levels of temperature and humidity for the storage of materials
- Implementing simple, affordable practices and preventive measures to protect collections and stay prepared for emergencies
- Responding to a specific preservation challenge, such as a mold outbreak
- Digitizing print materials and how this relates to preserving originals
In late 2019, a new coronavirus emerged and began to spread globally, causing a once in a lifetime pandemic. Personalizing the Pandemic offers a snapshot of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the professional and personal lives of theological and religious studies librarians, especially as they balanced meeting patron needs and institutional expectations while caring for themselves and their communities. It seeks to personalize the disruptive, chaotic, and tragic event we lived through while offering a record of this professional community’s experience for generations of librarians to come.
Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge
edited by Simon Schaffer, John Tresch, and Pasquale Gagliardi
Palgrave Macmillan
Born out of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy, this collection of essays presents innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of universal knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in which such claims have been made and executed. Contributors take a close look at everything from religious pilgrimages, museums, and maps of the world, to search engines and automated GPS. Current obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and ‘smart’ technologies. These obsessions have important social and philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume’s contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias, worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial relation between the way the world is known and how it might be displayed and transformed.
Best Practice Guidelines for Theological Libraries Serving Doctoral Programs
Edited by Katharina Penner
Langham
Libraries and librarians are indispensable to student learning and the formation of researchers at the doctoral level. This book identifies five areas and sixteen principles that need to be considered by theological schools when optimizing library operations to serve doctoral programs. As an illustration of these principles, the book provides narratives from four theological libraries – in Nairobi, Hong Kong, Bangalore, and Amsterdam – that have successfully transitioned to serve doctoral programs. The contributors present tested best practice alongside their successful experiences pioneering libraries that serve doctoral programs in challenging situations. An invaluable training resource for Majority World librarians, this book also offers insight into quality guidelines for accreditation agencies supporting theological institutions in developing robust and flourishing programs.
Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education
by Christine J. Hong
Lexington Books
A book on teaching and learning in theological education, Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education is guided by the questions, "What makes education intercultural and interreligious?" "How might we rethink and redesign spaces of learning to be hospitable to cultural and religious differences as well as to dismantle the coloniality of theological education?" "How might we subvert traditionally colonial spaces to model the engaged intercultural and interreligious world that we seek?" The book helps educators and practitioners of intercultural and interreligious learning both deconstruct and reconstruct spaces of learning by centering interreligious and intercultural intelligence through the voices, experiences, and narratives of minoritized people.
Reference Works in Theology/Religious Studies
The Handbook of African Catholicism
edited by Stan Chu Ilo
Orbis
A disciplinary map for understanding African Catholicism today by engaging some of the most pressing and pertinent issues, topics, and conversations in diverse fields of studies in African Catholicism.
The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy
edited by M.J. Edwards
Routledge
This volume offers the most comprehensive survey available of the philosophical background to the works of early Christian writers and the development of early Christian doctrine. It examines how the same philosophical questions were approached by Christian and pagan thinkers; the philosophical element in Christian doctrines; the interaction of particular philosophies with Christian thought; and the constructive use of existing philosophies by all Christian thinkers of late antiquity. While most studies of ancient Christian writers and the development of early Christian doctrine make some reference to the philosophic background, this is often of an anecdotal character, and does not enable the reader to determine whether the likenesses are deep or superficial, or how pervasively one particular philosopher may have influenced Christian thought. This volume is designed to provide not only a body of facts more compendious than can be found elsewhere, but the contextual information which will enable readers to judge or clarify the statements that they encounter in works of more limited scope. With contributions by an international group of experts in both philosophy and Christian thought, this is an invaluable resource for scholars of early Christianity, Late Antiquity and ancient philosophy alike.
Peshitta English New Testament: The Antioch Bible English Translation
edited by George A. Kiraz
Gorgias Press
After the success of the Antioch Bible, this publication is a new translation of the Peshitta English New Testament in a single volume. The English translations of the New Testament Syriac Peshitta were carried out by an international team of scholars.
Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions
edited by Henry Gooren
Springer
This encyclopedia provides an overview of the main religions of Latin America and the Caribbean--both their centralized transnational expressions and their local variants and schisms. These main religions include (but are not limited to) the major expressions of Christianity (Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses), indigenous religions (Native American, Maya religion), syncretic Christianity (including Afro-Brazilian religions like Umbanda and Candomblé and Afro-Caribbean religions like Vodun and Santería), other world religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam), transnational New Religious Movements (Scientology, Unification Church, Hare Krishna, New Age, etc.), and new local religions (Brazil’s Igreja Universal, La Luz del Mundo from Mexico, etc.).
Noteworthy Monographs
Origen of Alexandria and the Theology of the Holy Spirit by Micah M. Miller offers a comprehensive account of Origen's pneumatology. In examining the Holy Spirit's identity and activity in Origen's writings, this study reads Origen in his context and surveys his entire corpus. It shows that Origen grounds his pneumatology in Scripture and uses Jewish, philosophical, and earlier Christian teachings in exegeting the passages he believes pertain to the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is revealed to function in Origen's works as a single hypostasis dependent on the Father and Son for both his being and attributes, which ranks the Spirit below the Father and Son. The Spirit, however, is grouped with the Father and Son, distinct from all other beings and ranked above them. The Holy Spirit, therefore, is ranked third of all things. This relationship serves as the basis for Origen's belief that the Spirit's activities--giving spiritual gifts, sanctifying believers and making them holy, offering intercession, inspiring Scripture, and aiding in the interpretation of Scripture--are a common operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit, then, plays an integral role in the salvation of the human person. By offering a comprehensive understanding of Origen's pneumatology, Micah M. Miller also provides a fresh perspective of his Trinitarian thought.