I am interested in exploring the ways in which religion influenced the civil rights movement for my second paper. To start my search for the “shelfie” book, I used the online Lafayette library catalog and searched “Christianity and Civil Rights Movement”. Since we read about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X in class, I thought this topic would be relevant as a “shelfie” book as well as paper topic.

The book I found is entitled Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement. It is 924 pages long and can be found on the upper level of Skillman. There were few texts surrounding it that included religion in the title, but several books about African-Americans and the Civil Rights Movement. The book itself is a collection of stories from people around the time of the Civil Rights Movement. The book stresses that religion played a huge part in the Civil Rights Movement as many turned to scripture and sacred texts throughout that time. There are two volumes of the book, each is a collection of stories from a specific time period during the Civil Rights Movement. The table of contents is sorted by year as it lists different stories from each year during the time period that the book covers. Some of the story titles include “Spiritual Rearmament”, “The Church Amidst Ethnic and Racial Tensions” and “The Disturbing Christ”.

As mentioned before, there were few titles containing religion as part of the title on the same shelf as this book, so I will most likely have to look in other areas as well to find more sources. This source will be an invaluable resource in my research, as will the second volume. The book contains endless support to an argument that says religion had a vast influence on the Civil Rights Movement, and I look forward to exploring that more as I conduct research for my paper.

Houck, Davis W., and David E. Dixon. Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2006. Print.

Collett, Alice. Women in Early Indian Buddhism: Comparative Textual Studies. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2014. Print.

In beginning my search for the perfect “Shelfie” book, I used the keyword “Buddhism” to find the area in the library where the books about Buddhism were located. I knew I wanted to find a book about Buddhist women, so I chose the book Women in Early Indian Buddhism. I chose this book because for my research paper, I would like to compare and contrast women in Buddhism with women in Hinduism, so I thought beginning to assess some potential sources wouldn’t hurt.

In the Table of Contents, I found chapters about the Order of Nuns, female sexuality in Buddhism, womanly virtue, marriage, Nanda (Sister of Buddha), and other similar topics pertaining to women’s role in Buddhism. Flipping through the book, I discovered many graphics and images to enhance understanding of the text on the opposite page. I expected there to be many quotations and excerpts from several early Buddhist texts, as the subtitle of the book is Comparative Textual Studies. This reminded of the work we’ve done in class where we have extracted information about Buddhist women from the ancient texts, rather than reading a list of facts about them. Other texts surrounding this book were titles such as “Buddhist Women in Social Justice”, “Buddhist Goddesses of India”, “Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet”. After seeing these titles, I am even more inclided to pursue this topic and hope that there are similar titles in the Hinduism section of the library.