5/27/07 -- Library Closed Memorial Day & Commencement

For the week of May 28, the library hours will be as follows:

Monday, 5/28                     CLOSED for Memorial Day
Tues, 5/29 - Thurs, 5/31          8:30am - 11pm
Friday, 6/1                          8:30am - 10pm
Saturday, 6/2                     CLOSED for Commencement
Sunday, 6/3                          CLOSED

5/21/07 -- Late Night Study Breaks

For the week of May 21, 2007 the library will once again offer extended hours:

Monday, 5/21 - Thursday, 5/24     8:30am - 12am
Friday, 5/25     8:30am - 10pm
Saturday, 5/26     9am - 10pm
Sunday, 5/27     CLOSED

Coffee, soda, and study snacks will be served each night from 6:00pm until closing.

NOTE: The library will be CLOSED for Memorial Day on Monday, May 28.

5/17/07 -- Tools for Finding D.Min. Theses

There is a new link on the library's home page to assist researchers in locating Doctor of Ministry theses. (Look for the "NEW" icon.)

While none of these resources is new, the Quick Limit for theses in the library's online catalog is a new feature.

You can either click on the D.Min. link on the library's home page, or you can go view the new instructions directly here.

5/11/07 -- Book of the week: Turabian, 7th ed.

LB 2369 .T8 2007
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed., Kate L. Turabian, revised by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

The 7th edition of Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers features significant new material, a more user-friendly arrangement, much-needed rules for online resources, and an eye-friendly, two-tone typeset format.

Editors Booth, Colomb, and Williams have adapted material from their The Craft of Research and inserted it as Part I of the 7th edition. Researchers now get both a style guide and a research guide in one book.

The three-part format for the 7th edition also makes it easier to navigate. Part I is the new research guide; Part II is the rules for source citation; Part III is the style guide. In the 6th edition, the first chapter was a guide to the parts of a research paper which then had to be compared to the formats and sample layouts in the last chapter. The new edition combines all this material together in Appendix A along with instructions that are updated to reflect common word processor settings. And the index at the back of the volume now references items by page number rather than chapter and section, a great improvement in my opinion.

The 7th edition brings Turabian up-to-date by including rules and examples for citing online sources. Part II also separates the instructions for notes/bibliography style from the instructions for parenthetical/reference list style. What had been a completely separate chapter for citing public documents is now helpfully included with the rest of the citation rules. Part II of edition 7 now includes over 100 pages of citation examples compared to the 26 pages in chapter 11 of the 6th edition.

One weakness that is not corrected in the new edition is that Turabian's official stance for encyclopedias and other reference works is still that they should only be cited in notes. (17.5.3, p.191) Nothing acknowledges the difficulties of citing scholarly encyclopedia or dictionary references where signed articles are the norm. One can, however, adapt the instructions for edited collections on p.179 to sufficiently cite academic reference works.

Finally, the blue-and-black typesetting makes it much easier to distinguish in-text examples and to move one's eye from section to section.

It is fitting that the 7th edition has been published on the 20th anniversary of Kate Turabian's death. The many improvements in this edition will ensure its place on student bookshelves for years to come.

5/4/07 -- Book of the Week: New Faith in Ancient Lands

BV 3160 .N49 2006
New Faith in Ancient Lands: Western Missions in the Middle East in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, edited by Heleen Murre-van den Berg (Boston: Brill, 2006)

It is a common conceit that our problems are unique in human history. One of the reasons for studying history, of course, is to deflate that conceit by finding the overarching stories that have been part of human history for millennia. New Faith in Ancient Lands accomplishes this by giving historical insight into West/East religious encounters in the past two hundred years that evoke parallels with what we see in the news today.

Consider the story of Pope Gregory XIII who in 1582 sent two papal legates to the Coptic patriarch John XIV. In the middle of negotiations with the Coptic Church synod, John XIV mysteriously died. The legates were immediately arrested as spies and were not released until a ransom of 5,000 gold pieces was paid. As Anthony O'Mahony summarizes the end result of this attempt at reunion, "The results of the attempt at reunion remained ambiguous and contested through mutual lack of understanding between the two parties." (p.94)

Or consider the fate of Miss Matilda Creasy, one of the first female English missionaries to Jerusalem. Creasy became the treasurer for the Sarah Society, and partnered proselytization with the charitable work of the society. Most of the Sarah Society's money went to feed and clothe the poor women of the Jewish Quarter. On September 9, 1858, Matilda Creasy's beaten body was found outside the city of Jerusalem. Efforts to investigate the murder led to conflict between the Ta'amri Bedouin and the Ottoman government, resulting in the death of four of the Ottomon soldiers. No one was ever convicted for Miss Matilda Creasy's murder, but unflattering portraits of the Holy Land as a murderous land lived long after her.

Nor are all the stories negative: Consider the works of the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institution. Founded in 1836 in Kaiserswerth Germany and funded by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, the Kaiserswerth deaconesses worked to establish the Orientarbeit, an educational and nursing program in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Part of the Deaconness Institution mission was to raise up sisters from the local population. This partnership with local peoples contributed to the longevity of the Orientarbeit, and the last Kaiserswerth deaconess retired in 1974.

As Murre-van den Berg writes in her introduction, "There can be little doubt that the nineteenth century, like the early stages of the Crusader period, constituted a time in which influences and developments from many different parts of society contributed to an ever-increasing Christian interest in the Middle East." (p.17) The stories collected in this volume capture well the ambiguity, the struggles, and the seemingly few successes of Western missionary efforts in the Middle East. They are apt tales for our time.

Table of Contents:

Introduction / Heleen Murre-van den Berg

Spirituality and scholarship: the Holy Land in Jesuit eyes (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) / Bernard Heyberger and Chantal Verdeil

William McClure Thomson’s The Land and the Book (1859): pilgrimage and mission in Palestine / Heleen Murre-van den Berg

Fransciscains en terre sainte: de l’espace au territoire, entre opposition et adaptation / Giuseppe Buffon

Coptic Catholic church, the Apostolic Vicar Maximus Giuaid (1821-1831), the Propaganda Fide and the Franciscans in early nineteenth-century Egypt / Anthony O’Mahony

Danger and the missionary enterprise: the murder of Miss Matilda Creasy / Nancy L. Stockdale

Public space and private spheres: the foundation of St Luke’s Hospital of Nablus by the CMS (1891-1901) / Philippe Bormaud

Metamorphosis of a pietistic missionary and educational institution into a social services enterprise: the case of the Syrian Orphanage (1860-1945) / Roland Löffler

Deutschen Kurdenmissionen in Mahabad in ihrem Kontakt zu den orientalischen Christen / Martin Tamcke

German "Home Mission" abroad: the Orientarbeit of the Deaconess Institution Kaiserswerth in the Ottoman Empire / Uwe Kaminsky

American Protestant missionary beginnings in Beirut and Istanbul: policy, politics, practice and response / Habid Badr

"Missions in Eden": shaping an educational and social program for the Armenians in Eastern Turkey (1855-1895) / Barbara J. Merguerian

Evangelization or education: American Protestant missionaries, the American Board, and the Girls and Women of Syria (1830-1910) / Ellen Fleischmann

Muslim response to missionary activities in Eqypt: with a special reference to the Al-Azhar High Corps of ʻUlamâ (1925-1935) / Umar Ryad.