Some useful advice when reading a book …

… but make sure it’s your own book: ‘How to mark a book‘ by Mortimer J. Adler:

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here’s the way I do it:

• Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.
• Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
• Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won’t hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
• Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
• Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
• Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
• Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance.

The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I’ve already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work.

I tend to use lines in the margin to mark something important – the more the more interesting/ important I feel it is. I also use an exclamation mark if it is some thing surprising and a question mark if I’m not sure about what is written. I sometimes put an x if I think it is wrong.

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Oak Hill Ethics assignments

David Field teaches ethics at Oak Hill college.  Here are the assignments he set:

Part of this semester’s assessment package for the “Introduction to Christian Ethics” module which I teach here at Oak Hill.

Essay / exegetical assignment(s) – max 3000 words – 60%

EITHER

1) Imagine that the four works listed below are to be bound together as a single volume introduction to Christian ethics and that each of the authors is to give a 1500 word appreciation/critique of each of the other three books

a) David Clyde Jones – Biblical Christian Ethics
b) Romanus Cessario – Introduction to Moral Theology
c) Oliver O’ Donovan – Resurrection and Moral Order
d) Dennis Hollinger – Choosing the Good

Choose ANY TWO of the four books and construct each of those two author’s responses to the other’s work.

Notes:

• The appreciation/critique assumes familiarity with the work. This is not a task of description or exposition.
• Please major on doctrinal and methodological (meta-ethical) matters. By all means use discussions of specific ethical issues in these books for (brief) illustration but keep focussed on meta-ethics.
• For the purposes of this exercise David Clyde Jones means (David Clyde Jones the Christian ethicist as he may be known by a careful reading of Biblical Christian Ethics) and so with the other authors.
• Thus we have, for example, “If Hollinger read Cessario then what he’d love and affirm would be X and Y. However, he’d want to redefine Z, he’d be worried about the absence of P, and he’d not only reject Q but fear that it might undermine the whole thing.”

OR

2) Expound the framework, method, and vision of Christian ethics found in Peter Leithart’s books Solomon among the Postmoderns (2008, 170pp, epistemology plus); Against Christianity (2003, 143pp, ethics-politics plus); and Deep Comedy (2006, 155pp, metaphysics-eschatology plus).

Rationale:

1) All four of these books are extremely worthwhile in themselves (which is why they are on the indicative bibliography) and this assignment gives you the opportunity to acquaint yourself with two of them. Giving the appreciation/critique of these books from the perspective of another ethicist will deepen your understanding of both of the authors you are dealing with.

2) Peter Leithart is a contemporary Reformed theologian of stature and some of you keep meaning to spend some time becoming more familiar with his thought. These three books are clearly written, nicely accessible, and highly stimulating and between them they do indeed convey a framework, method and vision of Christian ethics. Although the assessment task is expository you will find that your agreements and disagreements with Leithart themselves clarify your own thinking about meta-ethics.

So do 1) if you want to be “forced” carefully to read a couple of really helpful introductions to Christian ethics.

Do 2) if you want to acquaint yourself with Leithart and inhabit a particular version of transformationist Calvinist ethics.

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Faraday Institute: Bioethics

The Faraday Institute has a number of lectures on bioethics – including stem cells, GM foods and genetic engineering – available to listen to as mp3s or videos. Check them out here.
The lecturers include John Bryant, Joe Perry, David Cook, Joe Perry and Francis Collins.

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