Welcome to the Guide for researching Clergy biographies!
Greetings and welcome to the Libguide for Clergy and Religious Biography! This guide is designed specifically to help students in the Truett Seminary Preaching 7316.01 and 7310.02 class locate resources for researching the biographies of significant preachers past and present.
The purpose of this guide is to help you 'get started' with your research by directing you to relevant reference works that may provide initial biographical information on your subject and bibliographic 'leads' to carry your research further and deeper into the life and significance of your figure.
While the guide aims to be comprehensive in coverage, it does not and cannot provide exhaustive coverage of relevant resources. The range of available resources is too broad to include everything. The titles included in this guide have been chosen on the basis of the following presuppositions:
- English speaking figures will (in most instances) be more relevant to student's immediate learning contexts than those whose ministries and pulpit oratory were conducted in non-English speaking languages.
- Biographies of professional clergy will be of greater relevance to students than those of lay preachers/spiritual leaders.
- Biographies of Christian clergy will be of greater relevance to users than those of other faiths
- Biographies of modern clergy/preachers will be of greater interest to students than those of ancient or medieval provenance, and this for at least 2 reasons:
a. They are more numerous and offer a wider range of options to the researcher
Hence, the national and geographical focus of resources in this guide is primarily on the English speaking world (America, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand). And the scope is further restricted to professional Christian clergy with a pronounced emphasis on the modern period (16th century - ).
