Interreligious Studies Resources

Jan M. Phillips holds a PhD in medieval history from the University of Washington (Seattle), an MA in medieval studies from Yale University, an MS in software engineering from the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul), and a BA in history from Stanford University. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War era, Jan completed archival research as a Fulbright Fellow at the Vatican and German Institute in Rome.

For twenty years, he taught courses on Jewish history, Islamic history, and Jewish-Christian encounter at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul. His teaching in these areas led him to recognize the problem of bibliographic management across such topics. His background in software engineering helped him to build a knowledge database for this specialized interreligious bibliography.

Jan is pleased to introduce, adapt, and maintain his bibliography - via the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning - to further both student and scholarly inquiry into interreligious and interfaith relations, past and present.

General

Upon reaching the 'entry screen' Enter or select a search argument in any field or more than one field below the top line of Topics; then, press SEARCH at screen-bottom.

SEARCH BY KEYWORD: The keyword entered is applied to Annotations and Abstracts. To search for a phrase or multiple individual words, enclose words or phrase in "double quotations".

SEARCH BY TOPIC: (Select from pull-down categories)

• Historical Period Assigned
• Subject
• Subject Descriptor
• Historical Source Type

SEARCH BY AUTHOR OR "WORK TITLE": (wildcard works here)

Wildcard meaning:

• Any set of characters entered in any field below the topic line will retrieve records for matches found anywhere in the selected field. This is a wildcard search driven by the "contains anywhere in the field" command.
• A failed search gives a "Search Again" option. If you take this option, the search screen is not cleared of previous entries, yet you may clear it with the option at the top. The screen is always cleared when you select return to Database Encounter Home at screen bottom.

NOTE: An effort to retrieve records randomly by relating unlikely category combinations (i.e., meaningless combinations) is likely to fail.

NOTE: For known names, recall that when a search includes middle names/initials these may not be present, causing a search failure, and surname entries will often retrieve all manner of names which include the entered character set. Diacritical accents (from many European languages) may cause variant spellings of surnames. The rule applied in this database is to ignore accent signs in the Last Name and First Name fields. (But search for both Muller and Mueller!) If you know a search argument in any European language, remember to try it - but without diacritical marks in the Name fields.

Guide to Advanced Uses
Guide to Non-English Searches
Guide to Selection Categories

Relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims span many centuries, and issues affecting these relations today go back three millennia. Historical periodization is always subject to the whims of past or contemporary historiography as well as the perspectives of the works at hand. Assignment of events to some 'time'; will shape meanings by cultural context. The three interacting cultures here have experienced and recount their histories differently. Inevitably, these periodizations are tantamount to interpretation.

An author's perspective and direction of argument of course plays an essential role in periodization. In assigning a work to a period, the bibliographer depends upon the argument made within the work about its context.

The subject of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations ranges broadly across both historical time and non-historical analysis. When a work is either not fixed within a typical era or intentionally spans multiple eras, the record is "meta-historical" while it retains meaning across time. Such a work is often assigned in this bibliography to the "Contemporary" period, particularly if the work is a secondary source (because the periodization work most often reflects a "modern-day" interpretation).

Source Type as a Category

Each record in the database is identified as one of several types of historical source. These source types, as used in this database, are defined here. Primary sources reflect a 'first generation of publication'. Generally, they are information captured as close as possible - in the language and the idiom - to the moment and location of the historical event of interest. Examples of primary sources are personal speeches, interviews with witnesses, records of judicial testimony, letters, memoirs, diaries, certain 'certified' documents, autobiographies, fiction novels (as evidence of an author's perspective). Archeological evidence, art works, and soil-samples may be primary sources when used to reflect human interaction (as with pottery sherds), although their interpretation must be considered an example of secondary evidence. An important and very common characteristic of primary evidence is its lack of awareness of the issues/concerns of the researcher. The information from primary sources has its own context and validity and yields answers to the researcher only under careful scrutiny. Norms for evaluating primary evidence are rigorous and keenly contested by researchers.

Secondary sources interpret, evaluate, and synthesize meaning derived from primary sources. Secondary information about an event of interest is by definition removed from the moment of the event and its location. Secondary sources are monographic and often reflect a focus derived from today's interests. Examples of secondary sources are newspaper articles, periodical articles, non-fiction books, directed studies, monographs of any kind, research reports, biographies, most types of information from television and radio - certainly including news 'programs' excepting live and unedited personal interviews. Unlike primary sources, secondary sources are usually shaped by issues and must be evaluated within the context of those issues.

Tertiary sources summarize evaluations achieved elsewhere, usually derived from secondary sources. Tertiary sources, because of their summary character, are least useful for 'raw' research. Examples of tertiary sources are textbooks, encyclopedia articles, and content-oriented reviews of research (written to summarize research progress). Tertiary sources are usually shaped by the presumed interests of the target audience for which the summary is compiled. Research Support works are aids to the specific task of research. Examples are publications of bibliographies. Support Science works are auxiliary to historical methodology. Examples are works of numismatics, onomastic, and prosopographical method.

Authorship in a modern scholarly setting involves assigning credit for a substantial intellectual contribution in the work to one or more known persons.

Collaboration in historical research is common and is frequently recognized in a sharing of authorship among several contributors or editors, all of whom share responsibility for the research. This bibliography includes many literary products where authorship is indeterminate or the subject of on-going inquiry. Further, cultures covered by this bibliography give less credence to literary authorship than modern western culture.

This circumstance occasionally poses problems of identification to the bibliographer dealing with such works. In such cases, the researcher will recognize that, in the case of primary sources, the determination of authorship made by the modern editor of the particular work will be followed. In some cases, authorship of a work determines meaning. One well-known case is in the questionable attribution of a number of New Testament epistles to the aposlte Paul.

In this bibliography, where attributions do not reflect the strong consensus in the scholarly field, that attribution will be avoided in assignment to subject categories. This does not reflect a bibliographic weakness, however. Multiple ways of accessing an item provide flexibility to avoid reliance on subject categories or authorship attributions. Researchers of course welcome on-going investigation of attributions.