Research Websites

Association of Religion Data Archives

The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) strives to democratize access to the best data on religion. Founded as the American Religion Data Archive in 1997 and going online in 1998, the initial archive was targeted at researchers interested in American religion. The targeted audience and the data collection have both greatly expanded since 1998, now including American and international collections and developing features for educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers. Data includes state, national, and global data on religious adherence, attitudes, and affiliations with religious bodies.

Pluralism Project

“The Pluralism Project was developed by Diana L. Eck at Harvard University to study and document the growing religious diversity of the United States, with a special view to its new immigrant religious communities.” This site offers: Images of America; On Common Ground CD-ROM; World Religions in Boston On-line Version; Directory of Religious Centers On-line Database; bibliographies, syllabi, links, and other information. 

World Factbook

The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities. Their Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as Flags of the World, a Physical Map of the World, a Political Map of the World, and a Standard Time Zones of the World map.

Bible Bulletin Board

Provides access to sermons and expositions of John MacAruthur, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon, and others. Sermon index by Biblical books.

Biblegateway.com

The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on keywords, phrases, or scripture reference. Over 50 languages and 100 versions are represented on this site.

Blue Letter Bible

Provides Bible texts in English (8 translations), Greek (including the Septuigint), Hebrew, and Latin. Includes the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge as well as commentaries, hymns, maps, etc.

Linked Word Project

From Bob Jones University, this ongoing project has “every word in the Bible linked to its lexiconal meaning. Every verb is linked to the parsing of the original language.”

New Testament Gateway

“Welcome to The New Testament Gateway, the award winning web directory of internet resources on the New Testament, currently being updated daily. Browse or search annotated links on everything from the Greek New Testament to Jesus in Film. For updates, new information, discussion, comments and assorted observations, please visit the NTGateway weblog.”

Old Testament Gateway

Welcome to Old Testament Gateway. The Old Testament Gateway is a comprehensive, annotated, academic directory of internet sites on the Old Testament.

ATLA Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative

Focuses on “visual materials, including digital images of woodcuts, photographs, slides, papyri, coins, maps, and manuscripts.”

Dead Sea Scrolls Online

The first comprehensive online collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. The original manuscripts are available for viewing high-resolution scan and links to a verse-by-verse English translation. Included on this site is the War Scroll, the Commentary on Habbakuk, Temple Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, and the Great Isaiah scroll.

Internet Sacred Text Archive

This site is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language. The site has one of the largest collections of transcriptions of complete books on Native American, Pacific, African, Asian and other traditional people’s religion, spiritual practices, mythology and folklore. While many of these pre-20th century books are flawed due to orientalist or colonialist biases, they are also eye-witness accounts by reliable observers, typically at the moment of contact. These texts are crucial to the study of tribal traditions, and in many cases, the only link with the past. Locked up in academic libraries for decades, sacred-texts has made them freely accessible anywhere in the world.

Perseus Digital Library

This is one of the best academic resources available on the Internet. It is a major collection of electronic resources relating to the ancient world, comprising scholarly essays, maps, more than 15,000 images, original language texts, translations, and philological tools. The works of more than 40 authors are provided, including Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Cicero, Homer, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plato, Plutarch, Sophocles, Thucydides, Vergil, and Xenophon. As an example of how this resource could be used, one can have the Greek text of a dialogue by Plato in one browser pane, and the English translation in another. The Greek text will have underlined words; when a word is clicked on, a box will pop up giving possible translations, grammatical information, and frequency statistics, with a link to even more information from the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon.

UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology

This website provides an encyclopedia on ancient Egyptian history and culture with peer-reviewed articles from the world’s leading Egyptologists, archaeologists, linguists, art historians, geologists, and others. Topics include scarabs, Osiris and the deceased, famine, and cordage production. Search, or browse papers by year. The articles are in English, each with an abstract in Arabic.

e-Catena: Compiled Allusions to the NT in the Ante-Nicene Fathers

Medieval scholars including Aquinas compiled references from the Church Fathers in order to illuminate scripture in collections called catenae, from the Latin for “chains” or “links.” In modern terms, a catena is a hypertext. Possibly the most comprehensive catena in existence, it has 12,517 cross-references.

Encyclopedia of Religion and Society

The Encyclopedia of Religion and Society marks a unique venture in that it attempts to bring together in a single-volume compendium a state-of-the-art summary of the insights gained by the principal social sciences of religion: anthropology, psychology, and sociology. To do so is to take, admittedly, a “one-sided” approach to the religion-and-society nexus. One could perhaps consider an alternative posture, more ethical in nature-namely, one that considers what religions think about society. Peer-reviewed.

Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science

“This Interdisciplinary Encyclopaedia is intended to provide new scholarly articles in the rapidly-growing international field of Religion and Science. These articles were written primarily by European authors and are available here for the first time in English translation. They offer a unique window into the approaches and perspectives of the European community towards what has become a field of immense cultural significance throughout the world. Each article provides a very readable and comprehensive summary of what is currently being discussed in religion and science on a specific topic as well as how these topics were discussed historically.” The articles are written primarily from a Roman Catholic point of view.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. The dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. You can cite fixed editions that are created on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives (every entry contains a link to its complete archival history, identifying the fixed edition the reader should cite).

Wabash Center Internet Guide

A selective, annotated guide to a wide variety of electronic resources of interest to those who are involved in the study and practice of religion, including syllabi, electronic texts, electronic journals, web sites, bibliographies, liturgies, reference resources, and software. The purpose of the Guide is to encourage and facilitate the incorporation of electronic resources into teaching.

WorldCat

The ultimate bibliographic research tool. WorldCat links the library catalogs of over 10,000 libraries globally to search for books by title, author, subject, etc. WorldCat is a premier resource for discovering all available books on a particular topic and getting the basic information about books to properly cite them using Turabian manuals.

Internet Sacred Text Archive

This site is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language. The site has one of the largest collections of transcriptions of complete books on Native American, Pacific, African, Asian and other traditional people’s religion, spiritual practices, mythology and folklore. While many of these pre-20th century books are flawed due to orientalist or colonialist biases, they are also eye-witness accounts by reliable observers, typically at the moment of contact. These texts are crucial to the study of tribal traditions, and in many cases, the only link with the past. Locked up in academic libraries for decades, sacred-texts has made them freely accessible anywhere in the world.

Pluralism Project

“The Pluralism Project was developed by Diana L. Eck at Harvard University to study and document the growing religious diversity of the United States, with a special view to its new immigrant religious communities.” This site offers: Images of America; On Common Ground CD-ROM; World Religions in Boston On-line Version; Directory of Religious Centers On-line Database; bibliographies, syllabi, links, and other information.

Duke University Historic American Sheet Music

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.

Name That Hymn

A website where you can search hymns by lyric, view lyrics for popular hymns, and listen to MIDI files of popular hymns.

Hymn Tune Index

The HTI database contains all hymn tunes printed anywhere in the world with English-language texts up to 1820, and their publication history up to that date.

Net Hymnal

You’ve found the #1 Hymn site on the web, featuring over 10,000 Christ­ian hymns, Author Bios, Composer Biographies, Hymn Histories and Gos­pel songs from ma­ny de­nom­in­a­tions. You’ll find lyr­ics, scores, MI­DI files, pic­tures, his­to­ry, & more. This wor­ship & teach­ing re­source is pro­vid­ed as a pub­lic ser­vice.

Hymn Site

An online United Methodist hymnal. psalter, common lectionary, and supplement.

Hymnary.org

Do you search for hymns and worship music for worship services? Are you researching a particular hymn? Looking for an arrangement or media file? If so, Hymnary.org is for you. Hymnary.org is an online hymn and worship music database for worship leaders, hymnologists, and amateur hymn lovers alike. At Hymnary.org you can search or browse hymns by title, tune, meter, key, scripture reference, and more.

The Hymn Society

Founded in 1922, The Hymn Society was formerly known as The Hymn Society of America, but the name of the organization was changed in 1991 to The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

The Hymn Society is for those who

• believe that congregational song is an integral component of worship
• believe that the writing and singing of new texts and tunes needs to be promoted
• value learning about the origins of the words and music they sing