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Catholic Research: Research and Reference

This guide is designed to serve as a starting point for research in Catholicism. The resources featured here are primarily open access resources, except where noted.

Catholic Reference Resources

Catholic Reference Resources is a joint effort between the Roman Catholic Denominational Group of the American Theological Library Association and the Academic Section of the Catholic Library Association to update James McCabe’s 1989 Critical Guide to Catholic Reference Books.

French and Spanish Missions in North America

French and Spanish Missions in North America describes French and Spanish missionizing in North America, and contains topology and hydrology information for missions, dynamic maps of mission history and historical maps, data for missions, native Americans, population information, epidemics, missionaries, and commodities. The site also includes an introductory essay to mission history and bibliographies for further reading. 

Religion Commons

Religion Commons is one part of the much wider Digital Commons Network, an open access institutional repository. The site contains a host of scholarly sources on several disciplines. The Religion Commons is broken down for researchers into sub-disciplines ranging from “Liturgy and Worship” to “Ethics in Religion.” Of the 173 participating institutions, top contributors include Pepperdine University, Asbury Theological Seminary, George Fox University, University of Dayton, and Liberty University.