Get Help
Skip to Main Content

Pastoral Theology: Books

A guide for students in the Pastoral Theology M.A. program, especially students in the Orange County cohort.

Important Thesis source

ATLA produces this publically available site, which indexes and abstracts projects and theses from over 100 Doctor of Ministry (DMin), Doctor of Missiology (DMiss) and Doctor of Educational Ministry (DEdMin) programs accredited by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS).

Find Books at LMU

 

LINUS is the catalog for all the Library's book and media collections. Use Title or Author searches to find books, E-books, videos, and other materials that you know exist.  Use Keyword or Subject searches (see boxes on the left) to look for books and other materials on a general or specific topic.

Electronic Monographs: ebrary and e-books

 The Library subscribes to a good number of e-books.  Besides the electronic Reference materials listed on the Getting Started page, we subscribe to monographs (single books) and anthologies (collections of essays) supplied by outside   vendors.  The majority of these books come from ebrary, with a lesser number coming from other vendors.

All e-books are cataloged in LINUS, searchable by author, title, subject and keyword.  They will be described as "electronic resource".  You can just click on the link in LINUS to get the contents of the book.  You'll need your MyLMU information.

With many e-books, you can use the table of contents and the index, just as you would for narrowing your search in a print book.  Often, the chapter in the table of contents or the page number in the index are links that will take you directly to the chapter or page indicated.  If not, you can copy the page number into the "go to" box and go directly there.

Investigate registering for a personal account in these softwares.  In ebrary, for example, you can highlight a passage, or create a note for that page; in either case, the software stores the page in your own little library 'bookshelf', so you can get back to that passage or page later, just by clicking on the excerpt in your personal 'bookshelf'.  You can create folders for different topics/classes/papers, and just get back to the books you've used with a click.

eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost)

This growing subscription package contains a large selection of multidisciplinary eBook titles representing a broad range of academic subject matter. There are more than 121,000 eBooks in this package, including titles from leading university presses .

Besides the usual searches (title, author, subject, etc.), a keyword search will search for the term within the full-text of books, and show a list of short excerpts from the pages where the term appears.  You can then click on a link to that page.

Example: A subject search for Christology showed 123 hits; Christology as a keyword found over 300. One of the books on Karl Rahner displayed three 'most relevant' pages with the word Christology repeated several times, with a link to each page.  Below was the table of contents for the book, each chapter title a link.

Explore and have fun!

Books from other libraries

   is a catalog of over 40 academic and public libraries throughout California and Nevada. All LMU students, staff, and faculty, can self-request books from LINK+ libraries online. (You''ll need your MyLMU name and password (or your OneCard name and Library/barcode number.)

The books are delivered to LMU at no charge to the borrower. Books arrive in 3 business days and are held at the Circulation counter for 10 days. The check out period is 21 days. NOTE: Overdue fines are $1 per day. Read more...
 
NOTE: If you live or work far from LMU, you can use the Elsewhere mode of LINK+, which will allow books you borrow as an LMU student to be delivered to a LINK+ library near you.  See the attached sheets for a description of the program.
 
Book not in LINK+ ?  Let us borrow a copy from a library that has one!  Use the book request form, available also on your Services For ... page.
Have a SCATLA or other academic library nearby?  Try browsing the BV 4000-4470 section in the stacks and Reference, which will cover Pastoral Theology; nearby sections in BVs cover other 'practical theology' related subjects. Then use their catalog to see what else you can find.

Keyword Searches

Make a good guess and search by Keyword.  You can narrow down too many results by combining your first word or phrase with another word or phrase with AND as the connector.  You can use OR to get either result.  You can truncate with an asterisk *to get words beginning with what goes before the *.

Major Dissertation-Finding Database

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

This database contains over 90% of North American doctoral dissertations and a smaller percentage of theses in the humanities and social sciences. Includes full text of dissertations and theses published 1997-present, and abstracts for earlier years.  Dissertation authors sometimes withhold permission for inclusion, which explains many of that 10% not in this database -- especially if the dissertation is going to be re-edited and republished as a book.

Google Books Search

Google Books includes scans of complete titles not under copyright, and selected pages from many other books offered by some major academic libraries.  Sometimes it will only show you one section of a book -- the very section you wanted via your search!  But sometimes nothing but the cover.

Google Book Search