Notebooks

As artists not uncommonly keep sketchbooks, so thinkers often write notebooks. Schubert Ogden is a thinker for whom writing notebooks has been an essential discipline throughout his long career of trying to think as a Christian systematic theologian. By his own confession, constantly writing down his thoughts so he could discover what he wanted to think has always been as necessary to learning how to think theologically as constantly reading in order to think fruitfully with the minds of others. This volume is a selection from the indefinitely larger corpus of Ogden's notebooks now archived in the Drew University Library. All arising from his thinking as a theologian, the entries selected are addressed to some of the more fundamental, and therefore mainly philosophical, issues now facing anyone who would do Christian theology systematically. While each entry stands on its own and may well be read discretely, they together make up a single many-sided argument for a distinctive way of doing theology today by resolutely pursuing a comparably distinctive way of doing metaphysics and ethics.