Blog Posts by Subject: Christianity

You can say it started in 1678 with the publication of John Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress. Then along came Hall Caine's The Christian (1897) and C.S Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia in the 1950s. Fast forward to the 21st century, major news magazines such as Time were talking about the Left Behind series. Yes, my interest was piqued when I read a 2002 Time magazine cover article titled "Apocalypse Now" about the popularity of the series. I checked them out of the library and read each one in order. I was intrigued and fascinated.

According to the Chinese Lunar Calendar, 2013 is the Year of the Snake. In the Chinese zodiac, the snake is equivalent to the Taurus in Western tradition. February 10th, 2013 to January 30th, 2014 will mark the Year of the Snake.

Perhaps no person in human history is more controversial than Jesus of Nazareth. The parable above (among many other well known ones) came from Jesus in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. In these quotes, Jesus emphasizes spiritual morality and responsibility; they also set up the foundation of Christianity. Despite the numerous teachings and sayings in the NT, Jesus is still an enigmatic figure shrouded in mystery; there is scant evidence about him that remains unclear, as he did not leave much behind regarding his own personal narrative and history. 

According to the BBC News, "Islam is widely considered Europe's fastest growing religion, with immigration and above average birth rates leading to a rapid increase in the Muslim population." There are currently over 15 million Muslims (Sunni and Shiite) living in Europe and Islam is currently the second largest religion in the world after Christianity.

This blog post will focus on NYPL’s rich collection on the history of Islam in Europe: past and present; the historical, political, cultural, and economic relationships between the states of Europe and the Middle East concerning multiculturalism, integration, segregation, gender and democracy.  

I had not slept for 34 hours. After a bad flight and two long bus trips, I was hiking, ecstatic, in a muddy mine. I touched the walls from top to bottom. Perhaps “he” had put his hands there too. I was walking in the steps of Galanga, renamed Francisco, and known as Chico Rei (King Chico).

Melissa Walker's newest book, Small Town Sinners, is about a girl named Lacey that is torn between falling in love and keeping her faith — all while taking a lead role in her town's sin-depicting haunted house.

I spent a recent weekend pondering the existence of God. It’s something I do from time to time because I was a religious person once, in the Judeo/Christian tradition, but am not so now. After many years, I’m still getting used to living without that label. I have to admit, my non-religious years have been very good years.

On Sunday, the first of October, 2000 in Rome, Pope John Paul II presided over the ceremony that would elevate Philadelphia born Katharine Drexel to sainthood. It’s doubtful that few, if any of the thousands present that rainy day in St. Peter’s Square were aware of the connection between the second American saint to be so designated and the collections of the Music Division of The New York Public Library.

Have you found your calling? The May film screening from The National Black Programming Consortium, The Calling, explores this topic as it follows seven people who feel that they have found theirs.



In our work at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, we regularly come across public school educators who believe that they are not supposed to talk about religion in the classroom. On the contrary, we feel that teachers can and should teach about religion.

The New York Public Library's Three Faiths exhibition explores the commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  But what of the other faiths of the world? There is much to be learned from all of them. Here is a selection of recently published books that discuss those differences as well as the importance of promoting greater tolerance and understanding.

When I started blogging last May, I hoped to post frequently, but my "day job" of cataloging the books I'd like to write about kept getting in the way. This year, I made a New Year's resolution to blog more regularly. To get started, I thought I would pick a "Spencer Collection Book of the Month" at the beginning of each month and write a short post about it—just enough to share with my readers some of the things that make it special, because the Spencer Collection is a Special Collection at the New York Public Library, and so all of our books are special. Or above average, anyway. (For those not familiar with the Spencer Collection, see my first post: "A 

So where is faith, exactly? What is the 411? Where can we see the role of religion in our lives and communities? The answer, of course, is pretty much everywhere. Religion, it seems, is all over the place, even in our relatively secular “modern” society. But where should we look if we want to understand the religious traditions of our neighbors? What kinds of things should we focus on?

For millennia, worship has been coupled with music. This bond often has been an uneasy one, and nowhere has that uneasiness been so openly displayed as in the churches of New York City. Beginning in the Colonial era, when a handful of musicians stubbornly tried to practice their craft in the face of indifference and puritanical sneers, New York's liturgical music slowly gained in artistry until it reached dizzying heights in the Gilded Age of the 19th century. By that time, many of the city's churches had become famous for services that featured moving and polished choral music. However, the making of that music had metamorphosed into its own strange branch of show business, complete 

Last week, students from the Seward Park Library's Center for Reading and Writing, the Library's free adult literacy program, took a field trip to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to see the exhibit, Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

As the group trundled up the library steps, one student, a lifelong New Yorker, remarked, "It's funny, I pass by here all the time. But this is the first time I'm going inside."

From “Abracadabra” to “Shazam,” and from “Say the magic word” to “Open Sesame,” humans have long believed that words and languages have a power far beyond and far deeper than their simple rational meanings.

Last week, a group of adult students and volunteer tutors at the Seward Park Library's Center for Reading and Writing, the library's free adult literacy program, gathered for an introduction to the Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam exhibit at Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, and to gauge interest in a field trip. 

If the Three Faiths exhibit has piqued your curiosity, here are five books that offer some historical background to the origin and development of the three religious traditions.

Jews and Muslims have a particular attachment to languages as expressions of the Word of God. Hebrew and Arabic are both sacred languages since both are in a sense the language of God Himself.

But there is an important difference. The Jews lost their Hebrew as a living language while the Bible was still in the process of formation. As a result, some of the last sections of the Book of Daniel are not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, a closely related Semitic language spoken by many in the Middle East, including Jesus, in post-Exilic times.