Cobb Institute

John Cobb & Friends Gathering: David Schwerin
2023-06-06 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online Event
Topic: My 20 year Spiritual Adventure in China

Presenters: David Schwerin, with responses by Zhihe Wang and Meijun Fan.

David Schwerin comes highly recommended by Zhihe Wang and Meijun Fan. He has shared with the Institute for Postmodern Development of China his business acumen and wise counsel, having been credentialed with an MBA in Finance (Bucknell) and a Ph.D. in religion (Temple). David has over thirty years of business experience, beginning as a financial analyst and senior investment officer with a large bank. He founded D J Investment Advisors, Inc. and has served as its President since 1976. Explore his website, www.consciousthinking.com, for “Speaking” and “Writing” primarily focused on his initial work in China on Socially Responsible Business. (Now it’s referred to as Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, or most recently Environmental, Social and Governance, ESG.)

Schwerin is author of Conscious Capitalism: Principles for Prosperity (Butterworth-Heinemann 1998) which has been translated into Portuguese and Chinese and is in its second printing in China. John Cobb praised Schwerin’s book Conscious Globalism: What’s Wrong with the World and How to Fix It (Digital Junction Press, 2005): “David Schwerin is doing great work in reminding the business community of its enormous responsibilities. Economic globalization has given corporations great freedom; hence, much depends on how they use it. Those who read Conscious Globalism will have their tendencies to conscientiousness and inclusive concern strongly reinforced.” Conscious Globalism was published in China in October 2005.

Schwerin says, “Because some authorities in China have misgivings about the word ‘Spiritual’ and what it entails, I have purposely limited the spiritual aspects of my work on my website. That said, I have spent many years working to introduce a spiritual path to China. It is called Pathwork and is based on Mystery School teachings that are thousands of years old. It consists of 258 lectures that were channeled over a 20-year period and are psycho-spiritual in nature. These profound teachings are drawn from ancient wisdom from both the East and West.” See his current blogs at https://www.speakingtree.in/david-schwerin/blogs. See also his most recent book, co-authored with Diana Muenz Chen, titled Know Your Soul: Bring Joy to Your Life. It will help you understand the term Soul as he understands it.

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
2023-06-07 08:30 - 09:30, 2023-06-14 08:30 - 09:30, 2023-06-21 08:30 - 09:30
Readings on Faiths Around the World is a book group that reads and discusses books covering the vast diversity of world faiths. Beginning June 7th and ending June 21st, we will read and discuss Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time together. The group will meet weekly on Mondays online via Zoom at 8:30 AM Pacific / 10:30 AM Central.

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This learning circle is made possible by a collaboration among friends:

Learning Circle: Process & Coffee
2023-06-08 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-06-15 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-06-22 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-06-29 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-07-06 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-07-13 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-07-20 08:00 - 09:00, 2023-07-27 08:00 - 09:00 and 1 more date
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.

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The 15th John Cobb Common Good Award Ceremony
2023-06-09 18:00 - 19:00
The John Cobb Common Good Award is the world’s most prestigious prize for ecological civilization. The award is named after John B. Cobb, Jr., one of today’s most important ecological thinkers and is given to those who promote this hope in effective and remarkable ways.

The 15th John Cobb Common Good Award will be presented to Dr. Yan Shi, co-president of International CSA Network, Young Global Leaders in 2016, in recognition of her more than 10 years’ remarkable dedication to the organic community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement in China. Through her actions, she has endowed academic achievement with practical significance and revitalized the meaning of labor. Together with her colleagues, she is transforming the work of farmers into a source of pride, the field of agriculture into a respected vocation, and rural areas into centers of aspiration and innovation.

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Process Pop-Up: The Diabolical Trinity
2023-06-12 17:00 - 18:00
In this Pop-Up, Dr. Mark Karris will guide us through research on why individuals are distancing from or leaving the church and discuss the differences between spiritual abuse, religious trauma, religious disorientation growth syndrome, and adverse religious experiences. We’ll also delve into the religious trauma caused by Hell indoctrination: the unholy trinity of traumatizing beliefs in a tormenting Hell, a wrathful God, and human depravity. Lastly, we’ll explore the impact of these beliefs and coping strategies, and describe healing interventions for those with religious trauma.

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Learning Circle: An Awakening Planet?
2023-06-13 08:30 - 09:30, 2023-06-27 08:30 - 09:30, 2023-07-11 08:30 - 09:30, 2023-07-25 08:30 - 09:30 | 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: Merlin Sheldrake, with Matt Segall
2023-06-13 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds

Presenters: Merlin Sheldrake & Matt Segall

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Matt Segall, the Cobb Institute’s Science Advisor, says of Sheldrake’s work: “He encourages us to wonder how our scientific image of nature would be transformed by the adoption of mycelial rather than mechanical metaphors.” Segall will continue the dialogue about Whitehead/process thought’s relevance to mycology and biology more generally. See this blog post for a sense of what Matt and Merlin have already explored: https://footnotes2plato.com/2021/09/27/towards-a-mycological-metaphysics/. Merlin’s presentation on this topic at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies has been posted to YouTube.

Merlin received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research institute. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. Learn more at his website. Matt is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA (CIIS.edu). He has published articles on a wide-array of topics, including metaphysics, Gaia theory, religious studies, psychedelics, and architecture. He also blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.

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: Kathleen Wakefield
2023-06-20 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Awakening Our Deep Earth Connections by Reading Poetry in Community

Presenters: Kathleen Wakefield

Kathleen A. Wakefield, a frequent participant in our Cobb & Friends conversations, is skilled in creating poetry and in engaging others in the poetry experience. She describes her time with us as

“Awakening Our Deep Earth Connections: how reading poetry in community inspires loving attentiveness to the natural world and each other.” She invites us into this experience.

Poetry is a deeply embodied art rising from the rhythms of breath, the senses, and the emotional and spiritual memories our bodies hold. Its music and image-making qualities are uniquely suited to expressing how our lives are bound up with the earth’s body, attuning us to the sacred web of relationships of which we are a part. Poetry voices grief for the wounding of our home, while also nourishing us as we seek to heal our relationship and move forward. Reading poems in community can be a transformative process as we share perceptions, “ah-has” of insight, and life experiences; the self is excavated at the same time surprising connections are made to the seeming “other,” human and nonhuman. Our world is enlarged, our compassion stirred.

Kathleen A. Wakefield is the author of two books of poetry, Notations on the Visible World (Anhinga Press, 2000), which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and Grip, Give and Sway (Silver Birch Press, 2016). She has taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music, worked as a poet-in-the-schools, and she shares poetry through public libraries. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Century, Georgia Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Visions International.

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: John Becker
2023-06-27 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Babbling on About Pluralism

Presenters: John Becker

Today’s title is taken from a chapter Dr. Becker wrote in the book he co-edited with Marc A. Pugliese, Process Thought and Roman Catholicism: Challenges and Promises. Becker, a Research Fellow of the Institute for Postmodern Development of China, has accompanied John Cobb to China. He is newsletter editor and board member of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. He earned a Master’s degree in Historical Preservation at CalPoly Pomona, and a Ph.D. in philosophy and religious studies from the Claremont School of Theology. He has taught courses at Loyola Marymount College, University of the West, and most recently at Lyon College, where he has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy. (At his LinkedIn page scroll to his posts about the skateboarding course this Southern California native taught in the Arkansas school.) His research interests are broad, including Buddhist-Christian studies, eco-theology, process philosophy, and religious pluralism. He was honored to receive the 2017 Young Scholar Award of the International Process Network. Becker’s lecture at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies in the section “Beyond Dialogue and Deep Religious Pluralism” is available at this YouTube link.

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: Bruce Epperly
2023-07-18 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: The Bible in Process Perspective: Learning from Stories

Presenters: Bruce Epperly

Join our conversation with Dr. Bruce Epperly, seminary teacher, pastor, lectionary commentator, and prolific author of over sixty process-themed books. On his personal website he says, “Process theology is an adventure of ideas,” and “The Bible is an adventure book.” See his current Adventurous Lectionary blogs for Patheos, or his archive of lectionary commentaries for Process & Faith. What follows is further information Dr. Epperly has shared with us.

Bruce Epperly served over forty years as a university chaplain, congregational pastor, seminary administrator, and university and seminary professor. Prior to concluding his full-time ministry at South Congregational Church, UCC, Barnstable, Massachusetts in 2021, Bruce served in various administrative and academic roles at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Wesley Theological Seminary, Claremont School of Theology, and Georgetown University. Bruce is the author of over seventy books in theology, spirituality, healing and wholeness, scripture, and clergy wellbeing, including The Elephant is Running: Process and Open and Relational Theology and Religious Pluralism; The Jubilee Years: Embracing Clergy Retirement; A Center in a Cyclone: Twenty-first Century Clergy Selfcare; Francis of Assisi: From Privilege to Activism; Mystics in Action: 12 Saints for Today; Prophetic Healing: Howard Thurman’s Vision of Contemplative Activism; 101 Soul Seeds for Grandparents Working for a Better World; and 101 Soul Seeds for a Joyful Retirement. His latest books are Taking a Walk with Whitehead: Meditations on Process Theology and Process Theology and the Revival We Need. He currently is working on manuscripts related to Teilhard and Whitehead and the importance of progressive/process-relational Christianity in saving the soul of the nation and planet.

In “retirement,” Bruce describes his life as spacious, meaningful, and busy enough. His days are filled with writing, preparing for classes and talks, walking, watching British mysteries, and spending time with his wife Kath and his grandchildren who live in the neighborhood. He wakes up eager at 4:30 a.m. for today’s holy adventure, which always includes an afternoon nap! On occasion, he even does part-time ministry for congregations, focusing on theological reflection, preaching, teaching, and reviving congregation’s spirits.

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 Secular as Sacred: Taoism & Confucianism from the Perspective of Process Philosophy
2023-07-20 17:00 - 18:00
The cultural tradition of China is notorious for its secularism. There is no belief in God, no special emphasis upon spirituality, no expectation of eternal salvation. All the teachings of Taoism and Confucianism seem to be nothing more than ethical admonition focusing on secular benefits. Nevertheless, China’s civilization has persisted for more than 3000 years and seems even more compelling in our time.

In this event, Dr. Zhenbao Jin wishes to decode the secrets of Taoism and Confucianism from the perspective of his special experience of healing himself from lymphoma cancer and other chronic health problems, as well as his related research in the past 10 years. He will discuss the cosmology of Taoism and Confucianism from the perspective of process philosophy and meditation as the way to embody such a cosmology. He will show how Taoism and Confucianism are more a developing scholarship than a close system of belief, due to their non-dualistic cosmology.

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Co-sponsored by the following:

John Cobb & Friends Gathering: Leslie King & Rolla Lewis
2023-07-25 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Process Certificate Program: Prospects for its Future

Presenters: Leslie King & Rolla Lewis

Eleven people completed the requirements to receive the Cobb Institute’s first “Certificate in Process and Practice,” a program which included online courses taught by Jay McDaniel, Andrew M. Davis, Jeanyne Slettom, Sheri Kling, and Marcus Ford. The program, guided by Terry Goddard, was designed as “A Transformative and Holistic Educational Experience to Cultivate a More Just, Sustainable, and Fulfilling World.” See the list of graduates and their synthesizing capstone “Springboard” projects. Future leadership for the program has emerged from the first cohort of graduates. Dr. Rolla Lewis has agreed to be the guiding Dean of the Certificate Program, and Rev. Dr. Leslie King has agreed to be the overall guiding Chairperson of our educational programs. Rolla and Leslie will share their experience in and hopes for the Certificate Program. Other participants have been invited to share their experiences of the Certificate program and their hopes for its future.

Rolla Lewis, Professor Emeritus in Educational Psychology at California State University, East Bay, has had a long career as School Counseling Coordinator at CSUEB and Portland State University. He is a Taos Institute Associate, which promotes social constructivism. In September, 2019, he shared with Cobb & Friends his perspective on “Lifescaping–Creating a World We Want to Live In.” Now retired in Portland, OR, his active gardening became the focus of his Certificate study’s capstone project.

Leslie King, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Waco, Texas, studied process theology with Nancy Howell in the Doctor of Ministry program at St. Paul’s School of Theology. Find her biodata here, and her blog here. Her capstone project was “Forever Young: Concepts of God and Launching Young Adults.” In her new role of Education Chairperson, she is a member of the Cobb Institute Board.

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.

Rethinking Process Theology and Religious Pluralism Through the Lens of Divine Omnipresence
2023-07-31 10:30 - 12:00, 2023-08-01 10:30 - 12:00, 2023-08-02 10:30 - 12:00, 2023-08-03 10:30 - 12:00
In this five-session course, students will explore the question of religious pluralism and consider what difference a process understanding of divine omnipresence and the centrality of compassion in all major religions can make to how one develops a Christian theology.

“All faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao. Each has formulated its own version of what is sometimes called the Golden Rule, ‘Do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you,’ or in its positive form, ‘Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.’ Further, they all insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody — even your enemies.” –Karen Armstrong

In 2001, Marjorie Suchocki wrote Divinity and Diversity, which explored the implications for religious pluralism within various Christian doctrines. In this course, more than twenty years later, she tackles the issue again, this time working from and focusing on a process understanding of divine omnipresence. The central question of this study will thus be the following: What are the theological and practical implications of interpreting religions through the lens of divine omnipresence? The first and foremost suggestion is the near-universal importance of compassion as an essential element of religion. Each session will conclude with a consideration of the role that compassion plays in one of the world’s great religious traditions.

If you’re in the Claremont area please join us in person. If not join us online via Zoom. All are welcome, and will be able to fully participate!

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John Cobb & Friends Gathering: William Andrew Schwartz
2023-08-01 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Center for Process Studies Ventures Forward

Presenters: William Andrew Schwartz

In February the Center for Process Studies celebrated 50 years as a faculty program of the Claremont School of Theology (CST), founded by John Cobb and David Griffin. The relocation of CST this summer to a new location in West Los Angeles is accompanied by re-affirmation of the Center’s mission under new circumstances. Dr. William Andrew Schwartz, Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies, will share emerging developments for its future programming and impact. Andrew has overall strategic and operational responsibility for CPS, including development and implementation of the CPS mission, programs, and strategic vision.

Schwartz is also Assistant Professor of Process Studies & Comparative Theology at Claremont School of Theology, and Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of the Institute for Ecological Civilization. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. He was a principal organizer of the Seizing an Alternative conference, from which his book emerged. His recent work has been focused on high-impact philosophy and the role of big ideas in the transition toward ecological civilization. Co-editor of Putting Philosophy to Work, and co-author of What Is Ecological Civilization? His academic interests are broad, and include Comparative Religious Philosophies, Process Thought, Ecology, Education, and more. His recent work has been focused on high-impact philosophy and the role of big ideas in the transition toward ecological civilization.

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.
