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.

""Like Anselm, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, and Tillich before him, Ogden unflinchingly tackles the most difficult issues in both theology and philosophy. With razor-fine precision he makes conceptual distinctions that allow previous confusions to be cleared away and new pathways for theological and philosophical thought to be opened up. The publication of his Notebooks offers us the rare opportunity to think along with a truly first-rate mind about the most important questions that human beings can pose.""
--Paul E. Capetz, Professor of Historical Theology, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

""While the 'notebooks' genre suggests random assortments of rough drafts, fleeting insights, and otherwise incomplete expressions of thought, the snippets collected here are every bit as conceptually rigorous and lucidly expressed as anything Ogden has written. Admirably distilled into the concisest of expressions, Ogden's philosophical thoughts on themes redolent of Peirce, Hartshorne, and Heidegger here stand sharply in relief, their profundity and originality all the more clear for their elegant compactness.""
--Dan Arnold, Associate Professor in the Divinity School, University of Chicago



SCHUBERT M. OGDEN is University Distinguished Professor of Theology Emeritus at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. His books include Faith and Freedom (Wipf & Stock, 2005), Doing Theology Today (Wipf & Stock, 2006), and, more recently, The Understanding of Christian Faith (Cascade Books, 2010), To Preach the Truth (Cascade Books, 2015), and To Teach the Truth (Cascade Books, 2015).