Newsletter Summer 2022
Apprehending the Beauty of Things
“Beauty is at the heart of all things. Beauty is at the heart of God, and the beauty that we see — and even create — is like the trailing wake from God's hand across the ocean of the universe. This is why, in attending to beauty, we become open to the mystery of God. In attending to beauty, we open ourselves to participation in God's own transformation of things to modes of beauty not yet realized, but hovering still on the edges of becoming.”
—Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
It's a Beautiful Day
Wherever there is pain or heartache we reach for beauty. Sometimes there is a song that speaks to our despair. The pain reaches toward the music, and the pattern of the dance between pain and song creates beauty.
In Japanese aesthetics there is a word, Yūgen, that captures that feeling. Yūgen is said to mean a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe, and the sad beauty of human suffering. Yūgen is not about what you see with your eyes but what you feel with your heart. It is expansive, and refers to an awareness of the mystery of the universe, an awareness which evokes feelings that are inexplicably deep and too mysterious for words.
Alan Watts once wrote of yūgen, noting that,
“There is no English word for a type of feeling which the Japanese call yūgen, and we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which Japanese people use the word, ‘To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.’ All these are yūgen, but what have they in common?”
It might seem superficial to post sunflowers on Facebook as a response to a war, but the sunflower evokes a longing for peace. The field of yellow sunflowers under a vibrant blue sky is a wish, a prayer, and a spell. The mystery that we describe as yūgen, lies within the hope. Its hope wrapped in a robe of flowers and sky. Yes, we reach for beauty because beauty heals. Beauty soothes. Beauty is a tomorrow that can be better in all its possibilities. Beauty reminds us that the world is good, even after tragedy.
Note from the Chair
The Cobb Institute and Beauty
Some years ago, I heard the poet Maxine Hong Kingston speak on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday. She wanted to talk about beloved community, but every time she said it, she inadvertently said beautiful community. The audience laughed, and I did too. But to my process influenced mind, she had it right. A beloved community is a beautiful community.
Our aim at the Cobb Institute is to help bring about beautiful communities. There are, of course, so many kinds of beauty: moral beauty, natural beauty, soul beauty, social beauty, tragic beauty, artistic beauty, and divine beauty. In the house of beauty there are many rooms.
At the Cobb Institute we have developed a spectrum of slide shows, free for the taking, that are pertinent to these various forms of beauty. One of them is on Ecological Civilization and Compassionate Communities. It speaks of six areas that are important to process thinkers as we address current needs for sustainable community: energy, food production, education, housing, economics, culture, and eco-city planning. We might call them six aspects of sustainable beauty. Together they contribute to social beauty, where people live with respect and care for one another, other animals, and the earth – and with a bit of joy too.
It goes without saying sustainable beauty needs people with soul beauty. Soul beauty includes many qualities of mind and heart that are so important today: attention, compassion, connection, gratitude, hospitality, imagination, playfulness, silence, forgiveness, and a sense of wonder. The focus on spirituality at the Cobb Institute is aimed at helping people grow in these forms of soul beauty.
And then, last but not at all least, there two forms of natural beauty: planet beauty and galactic beauty. We do indeed live on a small but gorgeous planet in backwater galaxy called the Milky Way. Along with other living beings, we are pilgrims in a larger adventure with cosmic proportions that consists of billions of galaxies, on many of which are planets with conditions sustainable for what we call life.
Our task, as human pilgrims, is to play our role in adding social beauty and soul beauty to this larger adventure and to One in whose heart the adventure unfolds. We do this in small ways, moment by moment, through acts of kindness and wonder; and we do it in larger ways by helping build communities that are life-nourishing, with education that is awakened to the larger context and to the many forms of beauty. Call it education for beauty.
It is sometimes said that beauty, and only beauty, can save the world. Let us imagine a unity – a One – in whose life the universe lives and moves and has its being. And let us imagine that we ourselves, along with all other creatures, belong to this living unity. Call it the deep Beauty. Perhaps we can think of ourselves as Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, Secularists and Pagan, but also as friends of Beauty. If so, then with a little help from Beauty’s friends, perhaps some of that salvation can transpire, for our sake and for Beauty’s sake. Deep down that’s what the Cobb Institute is trying to be about: beauty for each and all.
Jay McDaniel
The Arts
Novel Becomings is a blog that features the creative process of artists of all kinds, such as painters, poets, calligraphers, musicians, weavers, architects, and landscape artists. Each essay shares a story about the inspiration, the emergence, and the becoming of an artist's novel creation.
On Not Having a Body
by Kathleen Reeves | April 27, 2022
Meet Dave Huth. He loves beetles, salamanders, frogs and all creatures very small. Through the Process community, I became friends with him on Facebook and began to notice the poetic way he shares his love for these creatures. Dave's passion comes through in his photographs, prose and art. I was already impressed with Dave for his unapologetic posts of bugs and our shared appreciation of strange looking succulents, but when I saw his art, I was blown away. I know you will be too. Dave's passion for mico-nature makes him an exemplar for a process awareness way of being in the world. He shows us our world, woven with art, nature, philosophy, and experience. Dave knows and lives in relational process.
The arts are an integral part of the Cobb Institute; therefore, it makes sense to name Cobb Institute Artist Laureates.
Meet the Cobb Institute Poet Laureate Christina Hutchins
Christina Hutchins is a poet and scholar of process philosophy and theology. She has also worked as a biochemist, a Congregational (UCC) minister, and for many years taught theology and literary arts at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. She lives in Albany, California, where she served as the city’s first poet laureate.
Her poetry collections are Tender the Maker (2015 May Swenson Award, Utah State UP), The Stranger Dissolves (2011), finalist for the Lambda and Audre Lorde Awards, and the chapbooks, Radiantly We Inhabit the Air (2011 Becker Prize), and Collecting Light (1999). Her poems appear widely, including in The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, and Women’s Review of Books. Her essays on process theology, queer theory, and poetry appear in volumes by Ashgate, SUNY, and Columbia UP. Awards include The Missouri Review Prize, National Poetry Review Prize, a fellowship to St. Petersburg , Russia, and living in Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, NH, as the Dartmouth Poet in Residence.
“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.”
—Mahmoud Darwish
Meet Cobb Institute Musician Laureate Hope Montgomery
Combining lyrically rich songs with rhythmic melodies, Hope Montgomery’s music explores faith, doubt, self, and love entangled with an illustrative backdrop of landscape and nature. Born in the South, but a current resident of Rockaway Beach, Oregon, Hope’s writings are interested in the allure of place and calling. Hope has played the guitar her entire life and is influenced by other indie pop and folk musicians like Clem Snide and Bad Bad Hats. She is hoping to release her third album in 2023, and you can find the rest of her work at Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, or wherever you find your music.
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
—Plato
Tragic Beauty
In Christina Hutchins' class "Unfolding a Poem: Reading From a Process Perspective," we looked at the poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski. I had read the poem many years ago, and it moved me in its repetitive plea. Zagajewski asks us to find something of beauty in this world, even with its faults. It seems that he points out the beauty in nature such as wild strawberries and acorns, but he includes tragic beauty, “you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.” We must learn to accept or praise the failings of the world, to see the beauty and help heal the mutilated world. This poem speaks to me today as never before.
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
by ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
Translated by CLARE CAVANAGH
Try to praise the mutilated world
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Andy Goldsworthy is a British artist known for his site-specific installations involving natural materials and the passage of time. Working as both sculptor and photographer, Goldsworthy crafts his installations out of rocks, ice, leaves, or branches, cognizant that the landscape will change, then carefully documents the ephemeral collaborations with nature through photography.
"It's not about art,” he has explained. “It's just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last.”
“Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.”
—Andy Goldsworthy
Beautiful Thoughts
Photo by Joshua Earl
“Don't be afraid to delve into the big picture. Think big thoughts. Don't just embrace Beauty. Be embraced. Let the whole grasp you in its mystery and hold you spellbound with divine possibilities! The future of our species and our planet depends on this larger vision. Allow yourself some room to be surprised and bedazzled by an unfolding universe that welcomes you into its celebration. You are a significant part of this ongoing cosmic story.”
—Patricia Adams Farmer, Embracing a Beautiful God
Holistic Education
Upcoming Educational Offerings at the Cobb Institute
On May 11th we will begin the third in our series of courses taught by the awarding-winning poet Cobb Institute Poet Laureate Christina Hutchins. This course is unique and is designed for anyone interested in Whitehead and poetry. If you haven't taken either of the previous courses, that's okay; come learn about Whitehead's thought through the imagination of the poet.
The “vivid suggestiveness of the poets” can deepen our engagement with process concepts that have been well-developed yet also limited by conventional theological or philosophical thought. In this class, we will use poetry to animate felt understandings of several of Whitehead’s key ideas.
Many of you have been waiting John Cobb and Tripp Fuller to return to the Learning Lab. Well, coming in June the Cobb Institute will offer a course to be jointly presented by John and Tripp.
The Cobb Institute is excited to be partnering with Homebrewed Christianity to offer this captivating new class: Christianity in Process. In this six-week course, John Cobb will elucidate six of the themes in Christianity and process theology that he considers vital to his faith. Each session will include a mini-lecture by John, a conversation between John and Tripp, and responses to questions submitted by class participants.
The Cobb Institute curriculum committee has been hard at work these past few months. The committee was asked to develop a certificate program, and the hard work paid off. Beginning in August, the Cobb Institute will offer a three-course certificate program in Process Thought & Practice. All of the courses are open to anyone who is interested, and can be taken independently or as part of the program.
The first course, "Introduction to Process Ways of Living and Understanding," will focus on familiarizing students with several key concepts and introductory texts. The second course will provide a closer look at Whitehead's metaphysics. The third and final course, "Process in the World," involve a generalization and application and will provide a choice for students. Students can either take “Process and the World's Religions,” which will include a brief study of at least three different approaches to thinking theologically from a process perspective. Or they can take "Process and Society," which will focus on a selection of potential topics, such as science, economics, arts, ecological civilization, as well as some sort of practical application.
Students who sign up for the certificate program are only required to take one of the two process in the world courses. However, they may take both if they desire. These courses will be offered this fall, from August through November. We're very excited about this project, and look forward to presenting it to our friends, supporters, and hopefully some newcomers to process-relational ways of thinking and being.
Community Building
Hope is Realized with Esperanza Farm’s First Growing Season
The Esperanza Community Farm, a 12,000 sq. ft. urban farm at the Westmont United Methodist Church (WUMC), 1786 Denison Street in Pomona, celebrated its grand opening with its neighbors and supporters, as well as the Rev. Siosaia Tuitahi, District Superintendent of the UMC. It was a milestone in the history of the Cobb Institute’s (CI) work in the City of Pomona. That work began with a group that first met in November 2019 to discuss John Cobb’s question, “What would it look like for Pomona as a Compassionate City to feed itself by 2050?” The first meeting included representatives from CI, a professional community organizer, farmers, local clergypersons, and a retired attorney. The group agreed that a conference to discuss Cobb’s question was less helpful than building a movement. At the next meeting, the group renamed itself the Pomona Sustainable Food Alliance (PSFA) and began building a list of allies.
From the outset, the Rev. Ignacio Castuera, a founding member both of CI and of PSFA, worked to identify and invite Pomona church congregations into PSFA. His persistence paid off in May 2020, when Rev. Castuera introduced PSFA to WUMC’s then-pastor, Rev. Emma Vega. Rev. Vega and members of her congregation had been looking to start a community vegetable garden, but didn’t know how. They were excited to discuss possibilities with PSFA. Four CI members—Rev. Castuera, the Rev. Stephen Yorba (a certified master farmer), the Rev. Ron Hines and Michael Witmer—met with Rev. Vega and District Superintendent, the Rev. Melissa MacKinnon. Connecting to UMC regional administration would prove to be important. Rev. Hines, a former UMC District Superintendent, helped to navigate the UMC polity and hierarchy.
Rev. MacKinnon prompted Witmer (the retired attorney) to work with Rev. Vega to apply for a $5,000 startup grant from the UMC Cal-Pac Conference. The application process sharpened the parties’ thinking as it evolved from a vision into a viable business model for the Esperanza Farm. Weeks of discussion and collaboration paid off when the UMC grant was awarded and provided seed money for the project.
Personnel changes at the UMC slowed things for a few months, but another local UMC congregation and the regional leadership kept at it. Work restarted in earnest in early 2021 after the Rev. Jaime Torres was assigned to pastor WUMC. The addition of two other congregations meeting at the Westmont church added further impetus. The three groups visited the Buena Vista Farm in Pomona and became energized. With Witmer’s assistance, the MOU was reopened and the new congregations were written in, and the final MOU as approved in June 2021.
The Cobb Institute contributed $2,000 to augment the UMC grant, as did the two new congregations, bringing the total startup fund to $8,000. This was doubled by a matching grant from Community Partners 4 Innovation, bringing the startup pool to $16,000.
Witmer secured another grant from the California Alliance for Community Composting (CACC) to build a community composting hub at the Esperanza site. CACC staffer Elinor Crescenzi has since played a key role in organizing the composting hub at Esperanza. Donations in kind were secured from Amy’s Farm (20 tons of composted soil) and numerous tree pruning companies delivered hundreds of tons of mulch to the site. Rev. Yorba, designated the “Coach-sultant” in the MOU began weekly visits to the site to oversee site design, mulching, irrigation installation, bed construction and train the local team in the process of farming. Rev. Yorba’s weekly visits, compensated with startup funds, are expected to continue for at least two years, but the business plan contemplates his role continuing well beyond that.
The first harvest at Esperanza Community Farm culminates nearly 18 months of effort by at least six different organizations within the PSFA, and dozens of individuals from the participating congregations. Despite the pandemic, the team kept the ball rolling via Zoom. Esperanza uses a hybrid model of paid staff (the Coach-sultant and a composting manager) volunteers, and the churches and community organizations to provide educational programming. The project is intended and designed to build community while growing food and reconnecting people to the Earth. The vision includes drawing other local congregations to the site and inviting them to create similar farms throughout the region using underutilized church properties, with the support of community coalitions like the PSFA.
Michael Witmer, Cobb Institute Board Member
Spiritual Exploration
“In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.”
—Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making
Spiritual exploration requires an attitude of openness, a desire to learn, and a disposition of humility. Such seeking can lead to a recognition of the value of faith that is foreign to one's own, a recognition of beauty previously unseen, and a transformation of one's soul. Spirituality can and should be in everything we do. When we work toward building compassionate communities, we should do so from the spirit of life that sparks within us that adds beauty to our world.
In education, it is both giving and receiving, an exchange between educator and student. Spirit is present in the relationship. Spiritual exploration is constantly happening, but at the Cobb Institute we want to draw awareness to it, and inspire individuals to passionately pursue it. One of the ways we do that is in partnership with Process & Faith through pop-ups on a variety of topics, from Buddhism to Daoism to spiritual independents. This month we're co-sponsoring the following pop-ups.
Process Theology & the Enneagram
This pop-up will provide an opportunity to consider the Enneagram types, to see their relevance to process theology, and to consider how, together, the Enneagram and process theology might help us grow in our potential to help heal a broken world.
Islamic Approaches to Interfaith Cooperation
Join a dynamic discussion on Islamic approaches to interfaith cooperation to learn what the Qur’an say about other religions and how Muslims are thinking about religious pluralism today.
John Cobb & Friends Gatherings
May 3: Cosmic Pluralism: Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Swami Vivekananda’s Religion of the Future: Jeffery D. Long
May 10: Celebrating Recent Cobb Institute Developments
May 17: Relating Psychedelics to Process Philosophy: Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
May 24: Process Philosophy and Me: Isobel Zhang
May 31: Creative Localization in a Compassionate City: Dick Bunce and Michael Witmer
Conversations in Process Podcast
Conversations in Process has returned for a second season! Host Jay McDaniel will be interviewing exciting guests from both within the process community and beyond. You can check out the first three episodes of season two below. Find the show on your preferred podcasting application at https://cobb.institute/
Jeffery Long – On Being a Hindu Process Theologian
In this conversation, Jeffery talks at length about his own spiritual and religious background, dwelling on how the early loss of his father spurred questions to which he was unable to find answers in his inherited Catholic tradition, despite immense respect and appreciation for this religion. When he was eventually exposed to the Hindu tradition he was immediately struck by the profound consonance between the perspectives of these eastern scriptures and views he had come to on his own through independent spiritual exploration. This exposure eventually culminated in his conversion to Hinduism following a deep engagement with the sources of the tradition.
Matt Segall – The Intricacies and Insights of Whitehead’s Process Thought
In this conversation, Matt begins by sharing a bit of his own intellectual journey, telling how he came to Whitehead through Terence McKenna. He talks about his own spiritual background, growing up in a mixed religious family and coming to appreciate eastern religious sensibilities at a young age. Along with guidance from mentors, he eventually discovered that the spiritual insights from dharmic religions which had captivated him in his adolescence actually had equivalents within Western spiritual and religious traditions. Discovering these sources of Western wisdom was what eventually led Matt to encountering Whitehead’s own work, first exploring Adventures of Ideas before diving into Process and Reality.
Ellen Rowland – The Religiosity of Teenagers and Being a Youth Minister in 2022
In this conversation, Jay questions Ellen on a wide range of topics relating to the experience of teenagers. She begins by sharing how the process perspective is one which is often resonant for the youths in her congregation, stating that it provides a relieving alternative to Evangelical perspectives on God which can often be heavy-handed. She explains that process theologies offer effective language for discussing hard issues and confronting suffering—things which are certainly important in teenage life.
Process in Praxis Blog
Process in Praxis offers insights, reflections, and stories about the many different ways that people can live out process-relational perspectives. We hope readers will find inspiration in learning about the wide variety of novel and creative ways that process thought can be expressed.
Asking Animals: Photographs as Questions about Love
by Dave Huth | April 16, 2022
In this wonder-provoking piece filled with fascinating photos, Dave Huth invites us to see with fresh eyes, learn from, and feel into the lived experience of creatures off all kinds. His view is that developing deep empathy, care, and love for the non-human world is "one of the very important things that might save us."
The Cobb Institute Bookshelf
Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being
by Thomas Jay Oord
A strong case can be made that love is the core of Christian faith. And yet Christians often fail to give love center stage in biblical studies and theology. And most fail to explain what they mean by love.
Why is this?
Thomas Jay Oord explores this question and offers ground-breaking answers. Oord addresses leading Christian thinkers today and of yesteryear. He explains biblical forms of love, such as agape, philia, hesed, and ahavah. We should understand love’s meaning as uniform, he says, but its expressions are pluriform.
Widely regarded as the world's foremost theologian of love, Thomas Jay Oord tackles our biggest puzzles about the nature and meaning of love, divine and creaturely. His proposals are novel. They align with love described in scripture and expressed in everyday experience. Oord also provides radical and yet persuasive answers to questions about evil, hell, the Big Bang, divine violence, divine abandonment, and more.
Pluriform Love changes the landscape of Christian love studies.
by Rein Raud
Reality exists independently of human observers, but does the same apply to its structure? Realist ontologies usually assume so: according to them, the world consists of objects, these have properties and enter into relations with each other, more or less as we are accustomed to think of them. Against this view, Rein Raud develops a radical process ontology that does not credit any vantage point, any scale or speed of being, any range of cognitive faculties with the privilege to judge how the world 'really' is. In his view, what we think of as objects are recast as fields of constitutive tensions, cross-sections of processes, never in complete balance but always striving for it and always reconfiguring themselves accordingly. The human self is also understood as a fluctuating field, not limited to the mind but distributed all over the body and reaching out into its environment, with different constituents of the process constantly vying for control. The need for such a process philosophy has often been voiced, but rarely has there been an effort to develop it in a systematic and rigourous manner that leads to original accounts of identity, continuity, time, change, causality, agency and other topics. Throughout his new book, Raud engages with an unusually broad range of philosophical schools and debates, from New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology to both phenomenological and analytical philosophy of mind, from feminist philosophy of science to neurophilosophy and social ontology. Being in Flux will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone interested in current debates about realism, materialism and ontology.
by Tina Rock
Philosophy has traditionally considered reality as a set of static objects. Tina Rock transcends this understanding to explore the realistic potential of relational and dynamic ontology. Rock takes a new phenomenological path into a realism that discloses the world as temporal and relational.
Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond
by Ondrej Dadejík, et al.
A groundbreaking analysis of Alfred North Whitehead’s thinking on aesthetics.
Though philosopher Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles specifically to aesthetics, aesthetic motifs nonetheless permeate his entire body of work. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy versus mediation, and aesthetic contextualism versus aesthetic isolationism. The concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial to their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty.
The Matter With Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World Volumes I &II
by Iain McGilchrist
In his latest book, Iain McGilchrist argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it. He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain’s right hemisphere plays the most important part in each. And he shows us how to recognise the ‘signature’ of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake.
Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful – and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom.
It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.
- Is the world essentially inert and mechanical – nothing but a collection of things for us to use?
- Are we ourselves nothing but the playthings of chance, embroiled in a war of all against all?
- Why, indeed, are we engaged in destroying everything that is valuable to us?
In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces – ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today:
- Who are we?
- What is the world?
- How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time?
- Is the cosmos without purpose or value?
- Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?
Nature in Process: Organic Proposals in Philosophy, Society, and Religion
Edited by Andrew M. Davis, Maria-Teresa Teixeira, and Wm. Andrew Schwartz
The new physics, beginning in the early twentieth century, caused a rupture in the longstanding mechanistic paradigm of Descartes and Newton, opening up novel paths of discovery and new possibilities for deeper, organic ways of knowing and living. The emergence of Alfred North Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" was contemporary to the new physics and responded with a truly organic vision of nature through rigorous philosophical scrutiny, scientific critique and imagination generalization.
Whitehead effectively saw that addressing the mechanistic rupture required an innovative, organic departure. His critique of abstractions, his refusal to bifurcate nature, and his famous formulation of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" unveiled the inadequacies of mechanistic thought and the interdisciplinary value of a new organic paradigm.
Written by scholars around the world, the proposals that comprise this volume follow in Whitehead's footsteps in calling for an organic reconception of our philosophical, societal, and religious disciplines. Far from ousting creativity, experience, mind, feeling, and value, the organic shift represented in these chapters reintegrates what was lost in the mechanistic paradigm.
Underground Rap as Religion A Theopoetic Examination of a Process Aesthetic Religion
by Jon Ivan Gill
Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon
them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate.
Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic
argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion.
This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.
James and Whitehead on Life after Death
by David Ray Griffin
Life After Death?
It’s a question that theologians, scientists, and philosophers have tried for centuries to answer one way or the other. One side appeals to divine revelation, the other side relies on mind-body dualism and limits what counts as evidence by denying the full range of human experience. Now, in an era when it is possible to contemplate not just individual death but the death of the species, philosopher theologian David Ray Griffin weighs in on this provocative topic.
Using the mature work of philosophers William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Griffin presents a lucid case for life after death that is broadly inclusive of all types of human experience, including near-death experiences. He counters mind-body dualism with his philosophy of panexperientialism and cites evidence of a universe “fine-tuned” for life to suggest a divine reality and that does not require appeals to revelation. The result is a Jamesian-Whiteheadian, science-based affirmation for life after death.
Process Philosophy: A Synthesis
by Bart Nooteboom
This book analyses and compares a variety of processes of change: in evolution, learning and innovation, language and meaning, self and society and ethics and morality. Taking a realistic approach, the book is inspired by pragmatic philosophy, in particular, that of Dewey, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, and employs insights from economics, sociology, anthropology, and social psychology. The book aims to give a coherent synthesis of ideas about change and aims to see how one can take a process view of various features of humanity, such as knowledge, relations between people, language and morality, and how, vice versa, that might contribute to process philosophy.
“When the observable universe was born, there was a shuddering sound of timelessness bursting from the corner of the cosmos until the algorithmic sound of silence took over, revealing how the distinctive sound of the truth unfolds its formidable presence, how the tiny infinities of reality swing between space and time, how the cycle of life and death gives value and meaning to human existence, how noble ideas and creative concepts incarnate and traverse in three-dimensional realms, where beauty and tragedy fuse and transform to become transcendent infinities."
—Danny Castillones Sillada, The Unspoken Infinities of Silence
Ophelia is a painting by British artist Sir John Everett Millais, completed in 1851 and 1852 and in the collection of Tate Britain in London. It depicts Ophelia, a character from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, singing before she drowns in a river in Denmark.
