This is a Religion course assignment. The Annotated Bibliography assignment is an exercise intended to help you to learn how to find and identify reliable scholarly sources on religion. (Please go thr
The Annotated Bibliography is an exercise intended to help you to 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 of these sources in proper Chicago style format.
4) Write a short description that includes:
a. Where/how you found the source
b. Its main argument/point of view
c. What makes it unique/important
d. Why it would be helpful in addressing the chosen topic.
Potential Topics:
Choose either Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Chinese Traditions, Korean Traditions, or Japanese Traditions) 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, euthanasia, etc.)
NOTE: These topics can/should be narrowed down further in finding your sources. You do not need to try to address every aspect of the topic as long as you have sufficient sources. For example, you may wish to focus on a particular sect within Hinduism, or on Buddhism in a particular country.
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_formatting_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_formatting_and_style_guide/web_sources.html
Sample Bibliography Entry and Annotation:
Tsomo, Karma Lekshe. (2006). Into the Jaws of Yama, Lord of Death: Buddhism, Bioethics, and Death. State University of New York Press.
Available through the University of Manitoba Library, this book examines how death is viewed within traditional Buddhist practices, and what implications this might have for bioethical issues in the modern world. Tsomo’s focus is mainly on the Tibetan tradition, and he uses ancient texts an modern understandings to explore controversial modern bioethical topics. Furthermore, Tsomo
brings in his own perspectives on death by describing his own near-death experiences and how they affected his understanding of death. Connecting his own experiences to traditional Buddhist texts allows him to explore Buddhist conceptions of death as both an outsider and a convert. For the purpose of my research on euthanasia and ethics, Chapter 8, “The Ethical Urgency of Death”, and Chapter 9, “Extending Life and Hastening Death”, will be of particular interest.
