Religion Textbooks

Elementary New Testament Greek

Contributor: Ewald

Publisher: Seattle Pacific University Library

License: CC BY-NC-SA

This open-access textbook helps students learn to read New Testament Greek at the elementary level. It includes clear, concise explanations of grammar and syntax, helpful examples, and essential vocabulary, with no assumption of previous language study, and it does not require accents for most forms. At the end of each of its twenty chapters, students will find short Greek-language episodes from the life of a fictional early Christian family of Jewish ancestry, short readings from the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, and review/homework exercises that can help reinforce new concepts and vocabulary. This book can help students prepare to read Nijay Gupta and Jonah Sandford’s Intermediate Greek Reader: Galatians and Related Texts, also available as an open-access textbook.

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Reading the Bible as Literature: A Journey

Contributor: Ondich

Publisher: Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

License: CC BY-NC-SA

The Bible is one of the most published books in human history. It is also one of the most misquoted, misunderstood and misused books in human history. This happens because people are not always aware that the Bible is not a book, it is a collection of diverse writings. The Bible might even be called an anthology, and it will include everything from poetry to genealogy, pithy sayings to architectural mandates, mythology to letters. Knowing what one is reading helps one understand the ideas in the writings. We read letters in the context of who wrote them and who received them. We read sermons understanding the speaker's perspective may differ from the listener's perspective. So this text is an attempt to give historic, literary, geographical and cultural context to a complex and often poorly understood set of materials. This is very much an ebook, and needs to be used in that format. Pdfs and other printed versions will lose a great deal of the content.

(1 review)

Theological Questions

Contributor: Hanneken

Publisher: Todd Hanneken

License: CC BY-NC

Theological Questions is an Open Educational Resource (free textbook) that originates from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and was created with funding form the Atla OER Grant Program. This open textbook was used at St. Mary's in the first of two required core theology courses. It is designed to give a broad historical overview of theological questions from the perspective of the Catholic tradition. It seeks to represent fairly a variety of questions and answers within and beyond the Catholic tradition. This OER is a foundation for other teachers of introductory courses in theology who may wish to adapt it for their purposes.

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World Religions: the Spirit Searching

Contributor: Ondich

Publisher: Jody Ondich

License: CC BY-NC-SA

Humans across the globe and throughout millennia have searched for answers to questions like, "why are we here?" or "what am I supposed to do with my life?" And the answers people have found, or created, or chosen, have varied as widely as the cultures and people themselves. Some people focus on rules. Some focus on afterlives. Some look to become whole. Some seek adventure and learning. So this text, while full of various ways that people have searched and discovered and created, is only touching a few of the bigger traditions in our world. Hopefully each chapter will introduce the reader to some ideas from that specific tradition that enlighten them as to how a specific group of people think, believe, and live. This text is set up to be an ebook. The various videos, links and resources will only really work if the user keeps to the digital format. Read this book on a device--it will be a much more rewarding experience!

(6 reviews)

Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion

Contributors: Branson and Hendricks

Publisher: Rebus Community

License: CC BY

Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion introduces some of the major traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as some less well-known, but thought-provoking arguments for the existence of God, and one of the most important new challenges to religious belief from the Cognitive Science of Religion. An introductory chapter traces the connection between philosophy and religion throughout Western history, and a final chapter addresses the place of non-Western and non-monotheistic religions within contemporary philosophy of religion.

(2 reviews)

Studying the Bible: The Tanakh and Early Christian Writings

Contributors: Eiselein, Goins, and Wood

Publisher: New Prairie Press

License: CC BY-NC

Studying the Bible: The Tanakh and Early Christian Writings is a university-level, textbook introduction to the study of the Bible, its literary forms, and historical and cultural contexts. This textbook is a companion to the Bible courses taught in the English Department at Kansas State University, in particular ENGL 470 The Bible, though it is available for use in other courses and contexts. This textbook examines the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Tanakh) and the early Christian writings of the New Testament. It is an introduction to the analysis of biblical texts, their histories, and their interpretations. The emphasis throughout this textbook is on the literary qualities of these biblical texts as well as their cultural and historical contexts.

(5 reviews)

Intermediate Biblical Greek Reader: Galatians and Related Texts

Contributors: Gupta and Sandford

Publisher: George Fox University Library

License: CC BY-NC-SA

After completing basic biblical Greek, students are often eager to continue to learn and strengthen their skills of translation and interpretation. This intermediate graded reader is designed to meet those needs. The reader is “intermediate” in the sense that it presumes the user will have already learned the basics of Greek grammar and syntax and has memorized Greek vocabulary words that appear frequently in the New Testament. The reader is “graded” in the sense that it moves from simpler translation work (Galatians) towards more advanced readings from the book of James, the Septuagint, and from one of the Church Fathers. In each reading lesson, the Greek text is given, followed by supplemental notes that offer help with vocabulary, challenging word forms, and syntax. Discussion questions are also included to foster group conversation and engagement. There are many good Greek readers in existence, but this reader differs from most others in a few important ways. Most readers offer text selections from different parts of the Bible, but in this reader the user works through one entire book (Galatians). All subsequent lessons, then, build off of this interaction with Galatians through short readings that are in some way related to Galatians. The Septuagint passages in the reader offer some broader context for texts that Paul quotes explicitly from the Septuagint. The Patristic reading from John Chrysystom comes from one of his homilies on Galatians. This approach to a Greek reader allows for both variety and coherence in the learning process.

(3 reviews)

Six Ways of Being Religious

Contributor: Cannon

Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company

License: CC BY-NC

The book proposes the hypothesis that six generic ways of being religious may be found in any large-scale religious tradition such as Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism: sacred rite, right action, devotion, shamanic mediation, mystical quest, and reasoned inquiry. These are recurrent ways in which, socially and individually, devout members of these traditions take up and appropriate their stories and symbols in order to draw near to, and come into right relationship with, what the traditions attest to be the ultimate reality.

(7 reviews)

Ethics for A-Level

Contributors: Dimmock and Fisher

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

License: CC BY

What does pleasure have to do with morality? What role, if any, should intuition have in the formation of moral theory? If something is ‘simulated', can it be immoral?

(5 reviews)

Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology

Contributors: Brown, Gonzalez, and Mcllwraith

Publisher: American Anthropological Association

License: CC BY-NC

We are delighted to bring to you this novel textbook, a collection of chapters on the essential topics in cultural anthropology. Different from other introductory textbooks, this book is an edited volume with each chapter written by a different author. Each author has written from their experiences working as an anthropologist and that personal touch makes for an accessible introduction to cultural anthropology.

(17 reviews)