From Friday Mailing 28th January 2022

A slightly different tack this week. I wanted to share with you two of my favourite sites that offer free online books. The first is CCEL.org which I am sure many of you are familiar with. It stands for Christian Classics Ethereal Library and contains digital versions of out of copyright books. It includes a huge range of classic spirituality texts (eg Julian of Norwich) and historical texts (eg most of John Wesley’s writings) as well as the complete Early Church Fathers.
 
The other site is archive.org which aims to offer an Internet Archive. It covers all subjects, but there is a great deal of theology among its 34 million books. Some are fully open access, but those in copyright are restricted. It is not the place to look for the latest publications, but there is a lot of quality material here. You need to create a free account and can then “borrow” books for a particular period. I used it to look at Lamin Sanneh’s “Translating the Message” (1989) which I could borrow for an hour at a time. Ken