Topic: Putting Our Emotions on the Couch

Presenters: Thandeka

Thandeka will lead a discussion/workshop session exploring process metaphysics—experientially.   

Three exercises will be used to achieve this end, based on Contemporary Affect Theology, which was founded by Thandeka. Contemporary Affect Theology advances insights from Schleiermacher’s affect theology and Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience—the brain science of emotions. She will use three exercises (two created respectively by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey and one created by Thandeka) as part of her affective theological strategy. 

Thandeka’s goal here is to explore how undisclosed premises of affect-laden engagement, volition, moods, attitudes, and a history of patterning principles that motivate persons to make judgments about some facts and not others (as Dilthey noted) can get exposed today with compassionate understanding? 

Can small group work advance and sustain the emotion-based paradigm shift now underway—for an ecological civilization of networked local communities millions upon millions strong? 

Is small group work vital for this kind of empathic, bridge-building work? 

We will explore answers to these questions based on personal insights and collective reflections.

Thandeka’s Bio:

Thandeka is a black American, former Emmy award-winning television producer, and Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian who has spent most of her life trying to figure out the sources of America’s dysfunction and how to heal it. She founded Contemporary Affect Theology, which investigates the links between religion and emotions using insights from the brain science of emotions: Affective Neuroscience.  Jaak Panksepp, the founder of affective neuroscience commends her work as “decisive historical-philosophical analysis” that can provide “a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experience” (The Archaeology of Mind, 391). 

She has taught Contemporary Affect Theology at The Czech Unitarian Academy in Prague, Williams College, Harvard Divinity School and has been a Fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center, and a visiting scholar at Union Theological School and The Center for Process Studies. John Cobb Jr. was a member of her dissertation committee at Claremont Graduate University. Her books and essays helped secure her place as a “major figure in American liberal theology,” as Gary Dorrien notes in The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2005 (John Knox Press, 2006). 

Thandeka spent more than a decade as a small group consultant testing various ways to turn her theological insights into small group practices to advance the participants’ ability to heal and transform themselves and eventually, hopefully, the world. 

Thandeka used insights from affective neuroscience to track down the trauma foundational to 2000 years of Christian antisemitism (as densely argued in her book Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Renewal) and 300 years of American racism (as detailed in her book Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America).  The foundational insight of her work is that the human brain handles pervasive feelings of fear and rage in neurologically predictable ways to ensure survival. 

Her present work focuses on Untrolling America’s emotions [https://www.youtube.com/@TheUntrollingProject] and Universal Connections [https://universalconnections.world] small group work.

If you would like to receive regular announcements and updates about activities and events at the Cobb Institute, please join our list of Friends.

Can’t make it to the live session? Click here to access our archive of Cobb & Friends recordings.