Religious Studies: Websites

A search interface to find all the finding aids at the Library of Congress.

Has the online catalog of NARA's nationwide holdings in the Washington, DC area, Regional Archives and Presidential Libraries.
Provides online access to over 50 million historical electronic records organized in over 350 databases created by some 20 Federal agencies. Information in the databases covers a wide variety of topics.

ArchiveGrid is an important destination for searching through historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world.
Thousands of libraries, museums, and archives have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.

This archive covers all UC special collection archives plus those of many other institutions in California. It includes some full-text documents, images, and guides to other collections not yet online.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, launched in 2001, seeks to promote a deeper understanding of issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs.
The Forum pursues its mission by delivering timely, impartial information to national opinion leaders, including government officials and journalists. As a nonpartisan, non-advocacy organization, the Forum does not take positions on policy debates.

This site which has data files (1981-2008) created using SPSS, on a data portal called ZACAT, containing Europeans’ thoughts on religion, life family, work, sex, politics, and society. This site continues to add notifications of its new publications and book series EVS.

Contains detailed statistics on religious affiliation for every country of the world. It provides source material, including censuses and surveys, as well as best estimates for every religion to offer a definitive picture of international religious demography. It offers best estimates at multiple dates for each of the world’s religions for the period 1900 to 2050.

The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) is a four-year study headed by Professor Christian Smith of the University of North Carolina. The NSYR is intended to be the first major study of the role of religion in the lives of American Adolescents. The project includes a national telephone survey of adolescents and their parents in addition to in-depth interviews with a sub sample of the adolescents. Besides the results from the NSYR project, the website includes info on previous studies.

Official Vatican web site. Several languages supported. News services, Church documents, information on the Popes and departments of the Roman Curia

An Archive of Jewish periodicals in German.

A wonderful packaging of 100 yrs of history in civil & human rights, Jewish activism, etc. with references from media, film, etc.

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed almost 1,300 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans.

This Lutheran Reformation collection emphasizes Luther, Calvin, the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue, the English Reformation, the Confessions, and basic Lutheran Doctrine.

Based on The index of Christian art a thematic and iconographic index of early Christian and medieval art objects to 1400 begun at Princeton University in 1917 Contains works indexed by the archive since 1991.

Helping understand the shared traditions among the world's major religious traditions is a tall order for a website, but this lovely online gallery from the British Library does the job quite admirably. The site was designed to complement a recent exhibition at the Library, and visitors can start by viewing an interactive slideshow of those materials. Moving on, visitors will want to make their way through 78 various sacred texts.

Full text and page images of over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries.

This site provides access to digitised copies of historical manuscripts from the Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, Switzerland.

WorldWide Religious News is a non-profit service providing the international academic and legal community with up-to-date religious news from around the world. Events in recent years ranging from government suppression of the Falun Gong in China, to the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks and subsequent legal proceedings in Japan, as well as the terrorist attacks of September 11th, have motivated an increased awareness and focus on the unique interplay of religion and society.