The Annotated Bibliography is an exercise intended to help you learn how to find and identify
reliable scholarly sources on religion.
Steps:
1) Choose a topic (listed below) on how a particular religious tradition has responded to a
specific problem or issue in the modern era.
2) Collect at least five scholarly sources on the topic (books, peer-reviewed journal articles,
chapters of books, essays, theses, etc.) and at least one primary source (newspaper articles,
magazines, YouTube videos, podcasts, blogs, etc.) related to the topic.
3) Provide the bibliographic information for each source in proper Chicago-style
format.
4) Write a short description that includes:
a. Where/how did you found the source
b. Its main argument/point of view
c. What makes it unique/important
d. Why it would help address the chosen topic.
Potential Topics:
Choose either Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Indigenous Traditions or a New Religious Movement
(such as Mormonism, Baha’i, Wicca, Scientology, Falun Dafa, etc.) and one of the following
contemporary issues:
– Environmental ethics
– The role of women
– Issues of gender and sexuality (i.e. homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, birth control,
assisted reproductive technologies etc.)
– Bioethics and medical technologies (i.e. transplants, blood transfusions, etc.)
NOTE: These topics can/should be narrowed down further in finding your sources, if you don’t mind. For example, you
might want to focus on female priests within Catholicism, or on the issue of abortion within the Reform
Judaism, or on restrictions on blood transfusions in Jehovah’s Witnesses. You do not need to try to
address every aspect of the topic as long as you have sufficient sources.
NOTE: You are not permitted to use AI (such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, etc.) in the creation or
completion of the annotations for this assignment. Using automatically-generated citations for your
bibliographic entry is allowed, but be sure to double-check to confirm proper formatting.
Places to Look for Secondary Sources
• WorldCat
http://www.worldcat.org
• JSTOR
http://www/jstor.org
• Project Muse
http://www.jhu.edu/browse/
• ATLA Religion Database
https://web-p-ebscohost-com.uml.idm.oclc.org/ehost/search/basic?vid=0&sid=b17e4785-
409b-4d50-88bf-e1e6253de9c9%40redis
• Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.ca/schhp?hl=en
Citing Secondary (Scholarly) Sources
Be sure to cite all sources properly according to Chicago style. See examples here:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formattin
g_and_style_guide/general_format.html
Primary Sources
Primary sources are documents that are close (temporally and experientially) to the phenomena
under study.
Primary sources may be witnesses or versions of particular texts, memoirs, travel writings, diaries,
government documents, works of literature (essays, short stories, etc.), treatises, pamphlets,
articles in newspapers/magazines/journals, recordings, films, photographs, etc.
They may be published or unpublished and in any of several different formats (handwritten,
printed, photographic, moving image, audio, etc.).1
Be sure to consider reliability when choosing a primary source. For example, if a person is
presenting his or her own perspective as a member of the group, that is valid, even if it doesn’t
represent the group as a whole or even the majority opinion.
However, you should avoid things like YouTube videos, blogs, or podcasts that do not have a
verified author or who claim to be presenting an objective perspective that cannot be confirmed. In
other words, for this assignment, use secondary material to provide overviews and scholarly
analysis. Use primary sources for individual, insider perspectives of the religious tradition and how
its practices are implemented in real-life.
Citing Primary Sources
Be sure to consider the type of source when formatting citation. See examples here:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formattin
g_and_style_guide/web_sources.html
1 University of Michigan Library. https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282820&p=1884506
