Comprehensive Bibliography

The Files are arranged as follows:

Bishop J. E. Lesslie Newbigin

A Comprehensive Bibliography
by

Thomas F. Foust and George R. Hunsberger (updated by Paul Weston)

A lifetime of Lesslie Newbigin’s missionary engagement has left to us a rich and extensive testimony, enacted and spoken and written. In most of what he wrote he was putting on paper what he intended to say in some lecture or address he had been invited to give. And most of those occasions came about because of his personal engagement in issues critical to the moment, essential for the church’s missionary engagement. In all of it, his was always an ad hoc theology, spoken to a time and place in the church’s life as a community sent by the Spirit to bear witness to the reign of God in Christ.

This bibliography traces several kinds of materials produced from this missionary life. There are of course the published materials (section A). In regard to those, the bibliography is extremely comprehensive, though undoubtedly not entirely complete in that Newbigin’s writings have always tended to emerge and re-emerge in print in a wide range of venues. A limited form of annotation is supplied for each item to indicate, so far as it is known, the setting in which an address or essay was first given and/or to trace the various forms and places in which materials have been republished, including translations into various languages. In most cases, particular published materials are included in the listing only once, at the point of initial or primary publication. Revised editions of books have been listed a second time in those cases in which the revisions are substantive and are of significant importance.
A number of unpublished manuscripts are referenced in section B. The selection is limited to those works deemed to be especially significant for Newbigin research. Many more materials exist in archival collections that are as yet not fully catalogued. At the head of the list, detailed information is provided regarding the relevant archival collections. The locations where particular items can be found are included in the annotations.

A great number of audio and video recordings of Newbigin’s addresses are accessible from a variety of libraries. These are referenced in section C. While the list is considerable, it is undoubtedly well short of being comprehensive, given the number of institutional and personal recordings that surely must have been made along the way. Information about some of the places making these recordings available is given at the head of the list.

Each item in these first three sections is identified by a reference code that consists of the last two digits of the year of publication followed by up to four lowercase letters representing the first letters of the key words in the title. The materials are listed in chronological order by year within each section. Within each year, they are listed in alphanumeric order by reference code which generally, but not always exactly, corresponds to the alphabetic order of the titles.

Section D provides an extensive list of published reviews of Newbigin’s books. These are listed by book in chronological order. Section E adds a representative selection of books and articles in which there are critical engagements with Newbigin’s thought. Most of these are published but important studies (e.g. master’s theses and doctoral dissertations) that have not been published are also included. These materials represent the leading edge of responses to Newbigin’s challenging vision as well as a burgeoning scholarship on Newbigin’s work.