North, John, and S. R. F. Price. The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Something that has always intrigued me has been the amount of influence a few theological interpretations can have on a religion. Growing up as a Christian, I remember learning about the Council of Nicea in my Religious Education classes and find it a little unsettling that one of the major foundations of Christianity (the Holy Trinity) was decided by a group of people. The fact that there was an open debate about it made me want to understand more how the final decisions were reached. In class we learned more about this and I think it would be an interesting topic to look at more closely the upcoming paper.

At first, I tried searching specifically on JSTOR for “Council of Nicea,” but I could only find online sources that didn’t seem to be what I was looking for. I decided to use a different wording that was more broad for my next search and typed in “Ecumenical Councils.” This still did not come up with the results that I was looking for. I figured I must have been searching too specifically, so for my next search I typed in “changes in Christianity.” This gave me plenty of choices that looked like they would have the information I needed. One book looked particularly appealing. It was titled The religious history of the Roman Empire : pagans, Jews, and Christians, which would most likely have more information about the Ecumenical Councils. Unlike my last Shelfie, this book was published in 2011 and had an appealing cover and was much more up to date.

After looking through the table of contents, I was able to see that there was a lot of different chapters on specifics of each religion and their position in the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, there was not a specific chapter about the Ecumenical Councils, but there were chapters on Christianity. By taking a closer look at some of these chapters, there was information about the councils. If I decide to write my paper about this topic, this book would be useful to gather a little more information, but another source would most likely need to be consulted.

Something that has always captivated my interest is how the social aspect of religion affects the daily lives of modern people. Hinduism is a religion that has strict social classes set up by ancient doctrines that would seem to cause issues in our modern society. For this reason, I used the Library Catalog to search “Modern Hinduism.” After looking through some of the titles, the book “Modern Trends in Hinduism” caught my eye.

When I first saw the book, I noticed there was no elaborate cover, not even a title was on the front. The only text was on the spine of the book, but it appeared to be somewhat old. In the preface, it explained that this text was the result of a series of lectures given between 1968 and 1969 by the Committee on the History of Religions of the American Council of Learned Societies. This made the book more interesting to me because it was written in a time when social issues were at the forefront of the American public. Given the historical context, I found this book to be more intriguing.

After looking through some of the pages, I found that this book could be helpful to me in the near future. The beginning gives a brief introduction to the Hindu Religion, followed by more specific aspects of the religion. For example, it has a chapter about Hinduism in recent years, how contemporary Indian youths practice Hinduism, as well as how Hinduism affects Indian politics. These are all things that relate to how Hinduism affects the daily lives of people in the modern world. The main issue I could see with this book would be that it may be hard to relate to since it was written so long ago. India is a rapidly developing country so it is likely that many of the “contemporary” things the books explains are very outdated. Despite this fact, I could see this book helping me with my paper.