Disgarded aspects of my topic

I originally hoped to make my website much larger and include a number of contemporary issues in Christian studies. For example, I had hoped to include a page about the controversy regarding the teaching of creationism in public schools. That is a really important and controversial topic in our nation today, since it is estimated that about half of all Americans believe in creationism. Other issues that I wanted to touch on were Christian anti-abortion activism, and the issues raised against Christianity by atheist writers.

However I know that those issues are far too complicated and time consuming for me to adequately research and discuss. Now I feel that I will stay with the narrower topics of the Bible and the Church Fathers.

final website: page length

I think that I will follow the advice of Lynch and Horton (chapter 3) in making my pages fairly short and to the point. However, they will not be so short that each can be contained in a single screen shot. I will try to follow a logical coherent order in the pages. For example, on my page devoted to the Church Fathers, I plan to begin the topic by defining who they were and how they are important. The chronology of the Church Fathers is divided up into different periods: Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene. I will describe what these periods mean. Then under each period, I will provide a list of some of the most important Fathers that fall under that period, including some biographical information about them. I will then finish the page with a link to my links page where they can find websites containing English translations of their writings and any other additional information.

website images

I think that I might try to put a couple of images on my final website. If I decide to do so I will contact the websites from which I found them in order to get their permission. If that fails then I will try the free images that are available either through Microsoft or that are available for download on various websites.

Example Topic

I hope to devote one of my site pages to the study of the Church Fathers. The Church Fathers are early Christian writers who lived from the second to ninth centuries AD. Their writings are extremely important to the study of Christian history and traditions. In fact they are really the only repository of Church traditions. There are a number of very good websites containing English translations of the writings of the Church Fathers. Tertullian.org is one of the most important of these websites (http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/).

I find history, and especially religious history, to be a fascinating subject. My past research involving the writings of the Church Fathers has been a very rewarding experience.

Some useful resources

There are some very important websites that I plan on listing as resources in my final project. The following are a few examples.

New Advent is a Roman Catholic website with a number of useful resources. These include the complete Catholic Encyclopedia and the writings of the Church Fathers. (http://newadvent.org/)

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/) contains a large online library of Christian literature.

The Blue Letter Bible (http://blueletterbible.org) is a very useful website for the study of the Bible. There are a number of interesting features. These include Greek and Hebrew lexicons to aid in the study of the Bible in its original languages.

why I chose the topic

The purpose of this blog posting will be to present the topic of my final project for Information 652. I will also explain the reasons why I chose the topic in the first place. My final project will be a website of resources in Christian studies. Each sub page of the site will deal with a specific field of Christian studies. Each page will begin with an essay introducing the topic and will include a list of web links and other resources that would be useful for further research. A website such as this will have a very large potential audience, due to the fact that the Christian religion continues to dominate the Western World.

The choice of this topic is due to my studies as an undergraduate. I received my undergraduate degree in Humanities with a focus on Christian Theology. I have had a fascination with religious studies for a very long time, due in part to my Catholic upbringing. Due to my interest and knowledge of the subject, I hope to make an interesting website devoted to it.