Cobb Institute

Learning Circle: An Awakening Planet?
2022-02-22 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-03-08 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-03-22 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-04-05 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-04-19 08:30 - 09:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online Event
A Discussion Group Contemplating the Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

Facilitated by Dr. Ernie Tamminga, this group meets every two weeks to carefully consider how and whether Teilhard de Chardin’s hope-filled perspective on the human evolutionary future can still inspire us in a time full of conflicts and division.

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John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Carol Frances Johnston
2022-02-22 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Regenerative Agriculture: Far Superior to Industrial Ag

Presenter(s): Carol Frances Johnston

Carol Frances Johnston, Associate Professor Emerita of Theology and Culture, taught environmental theology and ethics at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, for 29 years. She has worked for eco-justice for over thirty years, including serving on the original Eco-justice Task Force of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and locally on the board of Growing Places Indy. She is also a Research Fellow of the Institute for Postmodern Development of China. Most recently she served as an advisor for the documentary, “Courage, Brains, and Muscle: Indiana’s Environmental Champions.”

Johnston will be augmenting a presentation she made in September, 2020 at the World Rural Revitalization Conference in Shanxi, China. She is the author of the booklet, “And the Leaves of the Tree are for the Healing of the Nations: Biblical and Theological Foundations for Ecojustice” (available here), and of The Wealth or Health of Nations: Transforming Capitalism From Within, which was recently published in Chinese. She has taught adult-education courses in a wide variety of churches and lectured as far afield as Singapore on issues of economics and environment, including Whitehead and economics, justice, the Bible and nature, and the public roles of churches.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

Learning Circle: Process & Coffee
2022-02-23 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-03-02 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-03-09 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-03-16 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-03-23 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-03-30 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-04-06 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-04-13 08:00 - 09:00 and 1 more date | Online Event
Process & Coffee is about spiritual integration and exploration. We meet weekly to dive into books by mystics and sages. The discussion that follows helps to deepen our own spiritual lives.

To learn more or join, send an email to learninglab@cobb.institute.

Cobb Birthday Celebration & Living Earth Movement Launch
2022-02-25 16:00 - 17:30
Please join us for a Zoom celebration ofDr. John B. Cobb, Jr.’s 97th Birthdayand the launch of theLiving Earth Movement

Dr. Cobb will speak aboutthe mission of the Living Earth Movement . . .to inspire global cooperationfor the sake of all life on our planet,beginning with the United States and China.The second and equally important priority isto promote an ecological civilization.

Special guests includeKarenna Gore, David Korten,John Perkins, Mary Evelyn Tuckerand more from around the worldInterfaith Blessings, Toasts, and Music

To receive Zoom info register atlivingearthmovement.eco

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - John Perkins
2022-03-01 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: What the Economic Hit Man Has Learned from Indigenous People

Presenter(s): John Perkins

John Perkins, New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance, will share what he’s learned in his world travels about the impact of our global economic dominance on indigenous peoples, and what we can learn from them about “a world that works for everyone.” You can subscribe to his newsletter at johnperkins.org.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

Process Pop-up: Daoist Meditation as Practice and Philosophy
2022-03-04 15:30 - 16:30
Facilitated by Zhenbao Jin

Meditation is not simply a practice, but a philosophy-based practice, or a practice-based philosophy. With philosophy I mean our fundamental understanding of life and the cosmos, and especially, our understanding of life and death.

Each of us begins the practice of meditation with a certain philosophy. The point is, what is our purpose to do the practice of meditation? Are we trying to prove that philosophy is true?

It depends on the philosophy itself. A philosophy that holds death is an inevitable and natural result of life will have effect upon the practice of meditation very different from a philosophy that holds death is not the end and life, including body and soul, has a potential of perpetual development.

Taoism belongs to the latter category. I would like to introduce my practice and research on these issues and expect a lively discussion with other members of the community.

Zhenbao will talk about Daoist philosophy for about 20 minutes and then we will have a discussion. In the last 20 minutes he will introduce the practice of Daoist meditation and lead a 10-minute session. After that, the group will discuss the experience.

To find out more and receive Zoom info…

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John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Dhawn Martin
2022-03-08 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Process, Interfaith Dialogue, and Fostering Compassionate Cities

Presenter(s): Dhawn Martin

Dhawn B. Martin, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Source of Light Center, an interfaith education center at University Presbyterian Church, San Antonio, TX. A graduate of Wellesley College (B.A.), Durham University, UK (M.A.), Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and Drew University (Ph.D.), her areas of academic interest include, public theology and civic engagement, process and political theologies, and multireligious dialogue. Courses taught include: “Power, Peace, and Love: Alternative Political Paradigms,” “Utopian Worlds,” Contemplation and Social Action,” and “Religion in a Global Context.” She is an ordained Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a co-editor of the volume Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Richard Falk
2022-03-15 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Making Ecocide a Crime

Presenter(s): Richard Falk

In 1973 Professor Falk drafted an Ecocide Convention, explicitly recognizing at the outset “that man has consciously and unconsciously inflicted irreparable damage to the environment in times of war and peace.” In 2021 he served as a judge for the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, seeking accountability for damage to aquatic ecosystems in Europe. (Check out this June, 2021, legal definition of “ecocide.”)

Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University where he was a member of the faculty for 40 years. He currently is a Professor of Global Law, Queen Mary University London. Falk has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009. He is the Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and between 2008-2014 served as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine.

Of the 20 books he has authored and another 20 he has edited, friends of John Cobb may remember Falk’s editing with David Ray Griffin of Postmodern Politics for a Planet in Crisis: Policy, Process, and Presidential Vision (SUNY, series in Constructive Postmodern Thought, 1993), and his more recent co-authorship with Griffin, John B. Cobb, and Catherine Keller of The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God: A Political, Economic, Religious Statement (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006).

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

Process Pop-up: The Role of Spiritual Independents in the Interfaith Community
2022-03-17 17:00 - 18:00
Facilitated by Jared Morninstar

Join an engaging discussion on being spiritually independent, and how these spiritual voyagers outside the halls of institutional religion can be important partners in interfaith dialogue.

To help you prepare, additional resources pertaining to the topic are provided on the event RSVP page linked below.

To find out more and receive Zoom info…

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John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Ronan Hallowell
2022-03-22 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Story of Wholeness: Community, Communion and Narrative Medicine

Presenter(s): Ronan Hallowell

Many of today’s catastrophes emerge from a profound problem of fragmentation that has infected modern thought and culture(s) – at least since the dawn of the Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology. The deep alienation characteristic of the modern world is rooted in a pathological story that yields a distorted view of the human relationship to the natural world. As Thomas Berry has argued, we need to retire these distorted, pathological stories and embrace the Great Story of the Universe. The Great Story is a multivalent story of wholeness and relationality.

This talk will discuss how stories of wholeness are emerging in contemporary allopathic medicine through the acknowledgement of the need for community and health justice, the healing potential of ‘communion’ experiences occasioned by psychedelic medicines and attention to the power of story that is emphasized in narrative medicine, a new field of study in medicine and the medical humanities.

Ronan Hallowell, EdD, MA, is assistant professor of medical education at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California where he serves as Director of the Health Justice and Systems of Care longitudinal MD course, Associate Director of the USC Center for Mindfulness Science, and faculty in the M.S. program in Narrative Medicine. He has been a student of integral philosophies, the world’s wisdom traditions and Lakota medicine ways for over 25 years.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Sabeeha Rehman and Walter Ruby
2022-03-29 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: We Refuse to Be Enemies!

Presenter(s): Sabeeha Rehman and Walter Ruby

We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship at a Time (Arcade, 2020) is a manifesto by two American citizens, a Muslim woman and Jewish man, concerned with the rise of intolerance and bigotry in our country along with resurgent white nationalism. Together, Rehman and Ruby have spent decades doing interfaith work and nurturing cooperation among communities. They have learned that, through face-to-face encounters, people of all backgrounds can come to know the Other as a fellow human being and turn her or him into a trusted friend. In this book they share their experience and guidance.

Growing up in Pakistan before she immigrated to the United States, Sabeeha never met a Jew, and her view was colored by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his youth, Walter never met a Muslim, and his opinion was shaped by Leon Uris’s Exodus. Yet together they have formed a friendship and collaboration. Tapping their own life stories and entering into dialogue within the book, they explain how they have found commonalities between their respective faiths and discuss shared principles and lessons, how their perceptions of the Other have evolved, and the pushback they faced. They wrestle with the two elephants in the room: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and polarizing material in their holy texts and history. And they share their vision for reconciliation, offering concrete principles for building an alliance in support of religious freedom and human rights.

To explore further the experience out of which Sabeeha and Walter write, check out their author profile and a YouTube discussion for the Central Arkansas Library System; an event announcement for the Beacon Hebrew Alliance, and this article in the Jewish Standard. You can follow Sabeeha Rehman’s blog here, and Walter Ruby’s “Keeping Hope Alive” blog here.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Thomas Jay Oord
2022-04-05 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Pluriform Love—A Theology of Well-Being

Presenter(s): Thomas Jay Oord

Friend of Cobb Institute, Tom Oord will discuss with us his latest book, further exploring his “open and relational” theology of love. He defines love this way: “To love is to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.” An award-winning author, he has written or edited more than twenty-five books. A gifted speaker, Oord lectures at universities, conferences, churches and institutions. He is known for his contributions to research on love, science and religion, open and relational theology, the problem of suffering, and the implications of freedom for transformational relationships. Learn more at his website for the Center for Open and Relational Theology, which he directs. He also is Director of an “open and relational” doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary. For access to his latest essays, blogs, and multiple short podcasts, see thomasjayoord.com.

Oord completed his Ph.D. in religion at Claremont Graduate School under supervision of David Ray Griffin. He is an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

Process Pop-up: Buddhist Disenchantment & Process Reenchantment
2022-04-08 17:00 - 18:00
Facilitated by Doug Holmes

Buddhists have long taught that the spiritual life eventually requires one to become disenchanted with the world. Process thinkers have suggested that to overcome our civilizational ills we need to reenchant the world that modernity has disenchanted. Do we have to choose, or can we have both? We’ll examine some quotes about reenchantment and disenchantment from the process philosopher David Ray Griffin and the Theravadin Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah. Process thought and Buddhism have a long and fruitful history, but will this drive a wedge between them? Join us for an enchanted hour as we divine into these questions.

To find out more and receive Zoom info…

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John Cobb & Friends Gathering - David Bartosch
2022-04-12 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Culture as a Core Process of Human Cosmic Life

Presenter(s): David Bartosch

Dr. Bartosch is a German philosopher serving as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, where he focuses on transcultural comparative philosophy, the traditions of world philosophy, and intercultural studies. He has been recently engaged with John Cobb in lengthy discussion about an upcoming publication. Bartosch says, “In this talk, I will refer to a concept of culture (especially also ecology-related) which stands in relation to the philosophies of Whitehead and to Dr. Cobb’s comprehensive works. I will try to interweave this topic with the thoughts on cosmic life discussed with Dr. Cobb during our January online meeting. In relation to ideas about culture and (eco-)morality, I might also refer to John Coltrane and Friedrich Schiller as case examples for artists’ thoughts on the subject matter.”

Here is a link to a detailed list of Bartosch’s writings and television interviews. He discusses why a German scholar finds inspiration in ancient Chinese philosophy in brief excerpts from this television interview. A more extensive interview with the Chinese press, about Wang Yangming as a reformer of Confucian tradition, is available about 19 minutes into this YouTube video.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

Learning Circle: Readings on Faiths Around the World
2022-04-14 08:30 - 09:30 | Online Event
Readings on Faiths Around the World is a book group that meets twice a month to read and discuss texts that deal with the vast diversity of world faiths, those that have had a very large influence for many centuries as well as those that may be newer and less well-known. The only prerequisite for this group is a desire to learn about the wide variety of religion expressions.

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John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Ilia Delio
2022-04-19 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Teilhard de Chardin as Process Thinker: Why We Can’t Stay Still and Neither Can God

Presenter(s): Ilia Delio

Teilhard de Chardin was an insightful process thinker who developed insights on science and religion that are valuable for our age. His ideas on a metaphysics of union, hyperphysics, the physics of love and mindful materiality all play a role in the Godworld relationship. I will discuss Teilhard’s unique contribution to process thought in his notion of the Christic and the elusive Omega Point.

Ilia Delio, OSF, is a Franciscan Sister of Washington DC and holds the Josephine C. Connelly Chair in Christian Theology at Villanova Universe. She is the author of over twenty-three books including Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology and Consciousness, a finalist for the 2019 Michael Ramsey Prize and The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love, for which she won the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award and a 2014 Catholic Press Association Book Award in Faith and Science. She is founder of the Center for Christogenesis, an online educational resource for promoting the vision of Teilhard de Chardin and, more broadly, the integration of science and religion in the 21st century.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.

Educational Development Meeting
2022-04-25 15:00 - 16:00
Dr. Jay McDaniel, Chair of the Cobb Institute Board, will join us to discuss an exciting new project of the Institute’s education team. Join us to learn more about this new educational offering.

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Maria Guadalupe Llanes, Heeyoung Jung, and Farhan Shah
2022-04-26 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Contrasts and Commonalities across Cultures

Presenter(s): Maria Guadalupe Llanes, Heeyoung Jung, and Farhan Shah

Process thought has become important for Dr. Maria Guadalupe Llanes, a Christian philosopher in Caracas, Venezuela, for Dr. Farhan Shah, a Pakistani Muslim process philosopher teaching in Oslo, Norway, and for Heeyoung Jung, a Korean Methodist working with EcoCiv Korea. As they share stories of their engagement with process-relational ways of thinking and being in their worlds, let’s see what we will learn by the contrasts and commonalities across cultures.

Information about how to access each gathering is made available via email. To find out about a single meeting, send an email to events@cobb.institute. If you would like to receive regular meeting announcements and updates about the 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.
