Reviews Database Search Tips

Every week we review over a dozen recent books, audios, feature films, and DVDs. We post links to these reviews on their respective homepages. At the same time, all the reviews go into our Reviews Database of more than 7,500 book, audio, and film reviews.

You are encouraged to use this unique database to find resources we recommend for your spiritual journey. In addition to allowing you to search by title and the name of an author or director, this database lets you start with a spiritual practice that is meaningful to you or a subject and tradition you're interested in and find resources to match.

Although you can always use Google to look for content at SpiritualityandPractice.com, searching for a review through this specially designed search engine gives you the advantage of being able to locate material that specifically coded to a keyword or tradition by someone who has read the book or seen the film. Our coding for practices is based upon our understanding of the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy that is used throughout this site. And our coding does not depend upon the actual word being used in the article.

Here are some tips for good searches in the Reviews Database.

• The quickest and fastest search is to search by the title only.

• You can also search by the name of the author (book or audio) or director (movie or television).

• If you are interested in resources related to one of the 37 practices in the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy, use the Practice field.

• You can use the Medium field to limit a search. Or, for recent reviews in any medium, see the pages with listings of Films Now Showing, Recent DVD/VHS Releases, and Books & Audios Recently Reviewed.

• You can search for more than one criteria at the same time. For example, you can search for all books (medium) about Buddhism (tradition) or all films (medium) about friendship (keyword).

&bull: To see a list of the common keywords used on the site, see the Map: Content Areas at S&P.