An accidental blog

"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.

Sunday, 29 October 2006

Calvinistic Philosophy and Reformational Thought index

Theo Plantinga has, with sponsorship from SSHRC, started to compile a list of the contents of reformational books. He explains:

The purpose of this index is to facilitate and promote the study of Calvinistic philosophy and reformational thought. The idea underlying it is that when it is not possible to hold in your hand a certain book that seems to deal with a subject of interest to you, it would be helpful to have some sort of detailed and objective indication of the book's contents. If a friend or colleague could photocopy the table of contents and the index when he visits the University of Rhode Island, let's say (which happens to have a copy of the book in its library), when he attends a conference there next month, he would be doing you a favor. You could then determine whether it would be worthwhile for you to try to get hold of the book via interlibrary loan, or to track it down in the used bookstores using the internet. Or perhaps you could then try to get someone at the University of Rhode Island to photocopy the one essay or article in the book that you need for your work.

Well, what if the table of contents and index of the book in our example, the one you have heard of but never have seen, were available on the internet? That's the idea of this index in a nutshell. With the permission of the publishers (in the case of books still under copyright) and with the blessing of the authors (where we can get hold of them), we reproduce the basic publication information, the table of contents, the index, the publisher's abstract (if there is one), and the dissertation summary (if there is one). It's as simple as that.

Deatils of how to get involved are here. A list of FAQ are here.

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