Religion

Authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable one-volume reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church.

The major encyclopedic reference source for the Roman Catholic Church. Includes the supplement volumes.

Providing an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to "Americana" and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures,

Covers Jewish history, religion and culture in Muslim lands, covering the seventh century to the present (2010), particularly in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods.

v. 1. Introduction; The Persian Period -- v. 2. The Hellenistic Age -- v. 3. The Early Roman period -- v. 4. The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period.

Survey articles with bibliography on sites mentioned in the Bible.

Listing archaeological sites, it also contains app. 100 pages on ancient churches and monasteries. Illustrated with more than 2000 maps, plans, charts and drawings.

"[P]rovides detailed, comprehensive treatments of the latest approaches to, and methods for, interpretation of the Bible."

A Dictionary of the Bible is the most authoritative, accessible, and up-to-date dictionary of its kind available. Containing over 2,000 entries it provides clear and concise information about the important places, people, themes, and doctrines of the Bible.

Provides "contemporary biblical scholarship on a comprehensive range of topics from the Old and New Testaments, the Deuterocanonical books, and from contextual studies of the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman worlds and their literatures. The biblical text used is the NRSV translation."

"From St. Augustine and early Ethiopian philosophers to the anti-colonialist movements of Pan-Africanism and Negritude, this encyclopedia offers a comprehensive view of African thought, covering the intellectual tradition both on the continent in its entirety and throughout the African Diaspora in the Americas and in Europe. The term "African thought" has been interpreted in the broadest sense to embrace all those forms of discourse - philosophy, political thought, religion, literature, important social movements - that contribute to the formulation of a distinctive vision of the world determined by or derived from the African experience."