Learning Circle: Beginning Process and Reality
2022-09-04 16:00 - 17:00, 2022-09-11 16:00 - 17:00, 2022-09-18 16:00 - 17:00, 2022-09-25 16:00 - 17:00, 2022-10-02 16:00 - 17:00, 2022-10-09 16:00 - 17:00, 2022-10-16 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Encountering Whitehead’s Magnum Opus for First-Timers

Designed for beginners, this learning circle will involve a close reading of Whitehead’s seminal work, discussing passages together in-depth as we work our way through the text.

FIND OUT MORE & SIGN UP

Learning Circle: An Awakening Planet?
2022-09-06 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-09-20 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-10-04 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-10-18 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.

FIND OUT MORE

John Cobb & Friends Gathering: Sheri Kling and Doug King
2022-09-06 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: The Biblical Narrative and Universal God Identity

Presenter(s): Sheri D. Kling and Doug King

Sheri D. Kling, director of Process & Faith and the John Cobb Legacy Fund, is working on an exciting project with Doug King, CEO of Presence International, a growing network that engages emergent, integral, and interspiritual organizations and idea leaders to facilitate a “global conversation for a new earth.” Sheri and Doug are offering a course called “The Biblical Narrative and Universal God Identity: Integral Theology and Process Approaches,” co-sponsored by Process & Faith and the Cobb Institute. The course will be on Zoom, begins September 13, and will run for six consecutive Tuesdays at 4:30pm Pacific/7:30pm Eastern.

Doug King is steeped in biblical scholarship and worked alongside his father, Max King, to develop Presence to offer events, a podcast, and other teaching resources. He uses Spiral Dynamics (a developmental model of human consciousness that considers Alfred North Whitehead one of its forerunners) to approach the biblical narrative, and has developed what he calls “integral theology.” In their discussion with John Cobb & Friends, Sheri and Doug will provide a brief overview of the exciting material they plan to cover in their upcoming course.

From their perspectives, both process thought and integral consciousness provide a developmental approach to the evolution of human consciousness. Process philosophy and theology have been used as life-giving tools in interpretation of the biblical narrative and in their teaching together, Sheri and Doug will investigate the use of integral consciousness models as complementary to biblical interpretation as well. Their primary question will be whether the biblical narrative has always been evolving toward and into universal God identity. The implications of the possible answers to that question can dramatically affect the future of long held Christian views of identity. This is especially true if the biblical narrative points to something beyond separation thinking with regard to identity. For our gathering, they will introduce the use of models like Spiral Dynamics to trace biblical history, finding meaning both in its original setting and as a process story of the evolution of spiritual consciousness with regard to God identity.

To learn more about Doug King’s organization and its work, visit https://www.presence.tv/. From there you can explore videos and the Presence podcast (available on iTunes and other podcast platforms).

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
2022-09-07 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-09-14 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-09-21 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-09-28 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-10-05 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-10-12 08:00 - 09:00 | 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.

Learning Circle: Readings on Faiths Around the World
2022-09-08 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-09-22 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-10-13 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.

FIND OUT MORE

John Cobb & Friends Gathering: Evaggelos Vallianatos
2022-09-13 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Brewing Climate Chaos and Pandemics in Our Backyards

Presenter(s): Evaggelos Vallianatos

Writing out of his experience as a scientist with the US Environmental Protection Agency (1979-2004), Dr. Vallianatos has published Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (Bloomsbury Press, 2014), an expose of the influence of the chemical-industrial complex on the regulatory agency. He has also written several articles on climate change, including this one, published August 4, which he recommends you read in preparation for our meeting. Valliantos is Greek historian with degrees from University of Illinois (BA, MA), and University of Wisconsin (Ph.D.) is attached. At Harvard University he pursued postdoctoral studies in the history of science, and he has taught history and the politics of environmental protection at several prominent universities. Early in 2020 Dr. Vallianatos reported to John Cobb & Friends about his experience of organic farms in China and in his native Greece. See what he’s thinking at vallianatos.blogspot.com and muckrack.com/evaggelosvallianatos.

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: Md. Abu Sayem
2022-09-20 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Religion and Ecological Crisis

Presenter(s): Md. Abu Sayem

Professor Sayem’s newly published book, Religion and Ecological Crisis (Routledge), compares perspectives of John B. Cobb and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Sayem explores how prescriptions of these scholars, a Christian and a Muslim, can contribute alternatively to techno-scientific initiatives in environmental sustainability. Taking Cobb’s “economism” and Nasr’s “scientism” as the key concepts for surveying the roots of the ecological crisis, the book offers interdisciplinary and interreligious insights into the debates about ecological equilibrium, motivational awareness in human mind and about entanglements between religion and the environment. A native of Bangladesh with extensive global experience, Dr. Sayem is Associate Professor in World Religions and Culture at the University of Dhaka. At the University’s website you can find his biographical information, including research interests, awards and publications.

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: Mark VanderSchaaf
2022-09-27 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Engaging with the Soul(s) of the City: Lessons from Dallas, Saint Paul, New York and Los Angeles

Presenter(s): Mark VanderSchaaf

In the early 1990s Mark VanderSchaaf was appointed as the first economic planner for the City of Saint Paul in Minnesota. Drawing upon his admiration for the Herman Daly/John Cobb book For the Common Good, and the teachings of Carl Jung and Rudolph Steiner, Mark devised a unique approach to economic development that yielded remarkable dividends for his city and its region. Mark’s presentation will share how his ideas crystallized with the help of mentors at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and how these ideas were then applied to the task of riverfront revitalization in Saint Paul and the entire Upper Mississippi River Valley. Finally, he will talk about teaching opportunities that subsequently materialized in Los Angeles (2004) and New York City (2013), which drew upon this experience.

Later in his career Mark became the regional planning director for the seven-county Minneapolis-Saint Paul Area (2004-2016) and upon retirement was elected national chair of the American Planning Association’s Regional and Intergovernmental Planning Division. In retirement, Mark has especially focused on the role that public art can play in the process of community-oriented economic revitalization. From that perspective, he delivered a keynote speech in Qingdao, China in January of this year at the International Award for Public Art ceremony and award program.

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 Thinking & Human Living
2022-09-30 17:00 - 20:00
The way we think and the beliefs we hold about the workings of our cosmos have a huge impact on the way we live. Often, our view of the world may rest on unquestioned assumptions that no longer reflect reality. In fact, some of our assumptions about the world work directly against human flourishing.

Since the early twentieth century, many have found life-giving resources in the work of Alfred North Whitehead and others working in what is now called process philosophy and process or open and relational theologies. Process thought often has more in common with ways of thinking that are found in the East – such as in the traditions of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism – than it does with the dominant worldview in the West. How might we apply these resources in both East and West to address the division and suffering we see in our world today?

In this 3-hour, online seminar, speakers from Process & Faith, a program of the Center for Process Studies of Claremont School of Theology will explore aspects of process thought that make a positive difference in human life and in the life of the earth. A second seminar is being planned for early 2023 on process thought and various religious traditions.

Find Out More & Register

John Cobb & Friends Gathering: Steven J. Dick
2022-10-04 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Astrobiology, Cosmotheology, and the Biological Universe: Implications for Religion and Theology

Presenter(s): Steven J. Dick

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: Andrew M. Davis
2022-10-11 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: From Negation to Exemplification: A Deeper Whiteheadian Cosmotheology

Presenter(s): Andrew M. Davis

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: Balancing Eight Spiritual Tensions
2022-10-12 17:00 - 18:00
Facilitated by Jared Morningstar

Join an interactive Pop-Up event where we will explore four pairs of religious and spiritual dispositions which are in tension with one another. Participants will explore the feelings that come up with each of the perspectives, and try to find ways to see richness in both sides of the tensions, rather than just rejecting one side and restricting one’s perspective. Together we will consider how we can hold these tensions with grace so as to not lose the organic dynamism of authentic spirituality.

Co-sponsored by the following

Find Out More & Register

Extended Sight & Process Philosophy
2022-10-15 10:00 - 12:00
Join us for this Saturday morning dialogue between physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín and Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee chair Matt Segall. Dr. Gomez-Marin, who is head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, Spain, will summarize the results of his recent experiments on “scopaesthesia” (in collaboration with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake) and on “extraocular vision” (inspired by the work of Dr. Jacobo Grinberg). He and Segall will then explore how these phenomena can be given coherent interpretation from a process philosophical perspective.

Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception loops across species, including flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. His latest research concentrates on human consciousness in the real world.

Àlex Gómez-Marín

Matt Segall is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where he teaches graduate level courses on process philosophy and German Idealism. His recent book, Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, put Whitehead’s process cosmology into conversation with various contemporary scientific theories, such as general relativity and quantum theory. This book is exemplary of much of Matt’s recent work, which puts ideas from process philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences.

Matt Segall

To reserve your seat and receive the Zoom information, click the Going button and enter your name and email.

This event is sponsored by the Science Advisory Committee.

John Cobb & Friends Gathering: Chris Hedges
2022-10-18 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War

Presenter(s): Chris Hedges

John Cobb has recruited this Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author, activist, and Presbyterian pastor to shed light on current events in Ukraine by placing it in a broad trajectory of America’s way of being in the world. Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. To sample recent examples of his Solutions Oriented Peace Journalism, see this link to an archive at Transcend Media Services. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America showOn Contact. For an archive of “On Contact” television programs, introducing “dissident voices,” go to this link. You are invited to learn more about Chris Hedges and to follow his writing at The Chris Hedges Report.

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.
