Religion: August 2006 Archives

There are strong apocalyptic elements to each of the major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Among the events prophesied are things like the appearance of a messiah, huge cataclysms, a last judgment, and the end of the world. Given the current awful conflicts in the Middle East--home to these religions--and the religious passions involved, the following articles and books might provide some food for thought.

Apocalypse: An Overview // Eschatology: An Overview // Armageddon, battle of // Millennialism // Mahdi // Messiah // Antichrist // Judgment of the Dead // Revelation, book of // Shia: Imami (Twelver) // Jerusalem in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam // Prophecy // Isaiah

Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism // Left Behind Series // Rapture, Revelation, and the end times // Contemporary Muslim apocalyptic literature // The resurrection and the afterlife // Eschatological themes in medieval Jewish philosophy // The fate of the dead : studies on the Jewish and Christian apocalypses // On the road to Armageddon // The battles of Armageddon

Evangelical Solidarity with the Jews // Ideological Roots of Christian Zionism // The Legend of al-Dajjal (Antichrist) // Eschatology: Some Muslim and Christian Data // Time, Culture and Christian Eschatology // Bin Ladin: The Man Who Would Be Mahdi // Waiting for the Messiah // Romance Between Christian Right, Jewish Establishment Seems to Be Cooling Off // Farrakhan: This is time of doom // Jerusalem in Islamic fundamentalism

--Fred Rowland

A partnership between the Philadelphia City Archives and the for-profit Avencia, Inc. has resulted in the creation of Phillyhistory.org, a website that provides users with an extensive online photo archive, historic streets index, and index to print photographs held in the Archives. According to Avencia, the site now provides access to "more than 20,000 scanned historic images" of Philadelphia (Avencia.com).

--David C. Murray

The recently released version 4.1 of America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts includes:

-Cross-database searching between Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life
-User-friendly searching, including inverted author names and punctuation alternatives
-Ability for users to save search histories to a personal profile
-Natural language date searching, in addition to the traditional decade and century searching
-Speed improvements for faster searching
-A display option for expanding all of a user's search result records at once
-Addition of a "print-this-entry" option for each record in a search results display
-Ability to easily limit searches to English language entries only
-OpenURL-support for book entries in the Historical Abstracts database

--Brian Schoolar (Electronic Resources Librarian)