Cobb Institute

Learning Circle: Readings on Faiths Around the World
2022-05-26 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-05-12 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-04-28 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-04-14 08:30 - 09:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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

Class: Using Poetry to Unfold Whitehead's Modes of Becoming
2022-05-25 17:00 - 18:30, 2022-05-18 17:00 - 18:30
How can poetry vivify and deepen our understanding of Whitehead’s Process and Reality?

This is the third in series of three four-week courses taught by Christina Hutchins. 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.

FIND OUT MORE & SIGN UP

Learning Circle: Process & Coffee
2022-05-25 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-05-18 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-05-11 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-05-04 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-04-27 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-04-20 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-04-13 08:00 - 09:00, 2022-04-06 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.

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Isobel Zhang
2022-05-24 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Process Philosophy and Me

Presenter(s): Isobel Zhang

Isobel Zhang, a Chinese educator and author, is China director of ACTAsia, an organization promoting nature education for children since 2006. She will share her personal journey, including how the poetry of her teacher Bai Ya introduced her to process philosophy. A book she’s been working on since 2020, Caring For Life: Education Based on Mental Model Improvement, will be published in October. In it Zhang explains what she thinks about the support from process philosophy. She’s been involved in creating the first module for training teachers to encourage children to Care for Life with compassion and respect. Children’s books they have published in English and Chinese stress empathy and responsibility along with critical thinking. Series titles include Be Caring, Be Kind, Be Respectful, Be Together. Browse the references to Isobel Zhang on the ACTAsia website, which includes some of her earlier work on animal welfare concerns. She comes to us highly recommended by Dr. Zhihe Wang, Director of the Institute for Postmodern China.

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: Islamic Approaches to Interfaith Cooperation
2022-05-19 17:00 - 18:00
Facilitated by Jared Morningstar

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. This pop-up will be hosted on Zoom and facilitated by Jared Morningstar. The session will last approximately one hour. Resources pertaining to the topic are provided at the event page linked below as springboards for discussion.

Sponsored by Process & Faith and the Cobb Institute.

To find out more and receive Zoom info…

RSVP NOW

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
2022-05-17 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Relating Psychedelics to Process Philosophy

Presenter(s): Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

We host conversation with the author of his new book exploring the relation of psychedelics to metaphysics, panpsychism, and process thought more generally. He may also tell us about how that relates to the Exeter University Psychedelic Research Group. Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind who specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, and in fields pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of mind. Following his degree in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, he became a Philosophy lecturer in London for six years after which he pursued his PhD at The University of Exeter – where he is now a research fellow and associate lecturer.

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: An Awakening Planet?
2022-05-17 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-05-03 08:30 - 09:30, 2022-04-19 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 - Celebrating Recent Developments at the Cobb Institute
2022-05-10 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Celebrating Recent Developments at the Cobb Institute

Join us for a discussion about the latest developments and share some exciting announcements about what’s happening at the Institute.

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: Process Theology and the Enneagram
2022-05-04 17:00 - 18:00
Facilitated by Ken Pearson & Jay McDaniel

Process theology invites us to imagine God as “in process” with us, adapting to our unique situation and context by availing us of fresh possibilities for a journey into wholeness, relative to our personality and propensities. We can become more available to God’s living presence by understanding our gifts and limitations and appreciating the gifts of others who are different from us. God works in them in their ways, just as God works in us in our ways. With its powerful typology, the Enneagram contributes significantly to this self-understanding and appreciation. It also helps us recognize that, so often our gifts our also our sins, thus avoiding the liabilities of self-deception. Our hour together 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. The wholeness we seek is not personal alone, but social and ecological too.

Sponsored by Process & Faith and the Cobb Institute.

To find out more and receive Zoom info…

RSVP at Process & Faith

John Cobb & Friends Gathering - Jefferey Long
2022-05-03 10:00 - 12:00 | Online Event
Topic: Cosmic Pluralism: Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Swami Vivekananda’s Religion of the Future

Presenter(s): Jefferey Long

Jeffery D. Long is Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College, in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, where he has taught since receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2000. He is the editor, most recently, of the volume Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, and Scientific, as well as the co-editor of the Buddhism and Jainism volumes of the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions.

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 Kyoto School: a Buddhist Contribution to Ecological Civilization
2022-04-27 17:00 - 18:00
Facilitated by Jared Morningstar

Join a sophisticated discussion of the Kyoto School of philosophy and how these cosmopolitan Buddhist thinkers offer resources for building ecological civilization.

From The Kyoto School: True Emptiness, Wondrous Being website:

“The Kyoto School was founded by Nishida Kitaro at the beginning of the 20th century, and now covers three generations of philosophers who have endeavoured to express the insights of the East in the philosophical language of the West. As they did so, however, they have in fact created a new kind of philosophy, a radically new way of thinking from the standpoint of emptiness – and empathy – which goes beyond the limited scope of traditional Western philosophy, which is the standpoint of being – and that of the self-centred calculative mind, cut off from a true experience of reality. Their insights will be of interest to those interested in current research about the nature of consciousness and cognition, as well as those concerned by the inadequacy of the prevalent Western mode of thinking in tackling social, political, economic and environmental issues.”

The Kyoto School and its representatives offer a unique dialogue with traditions of Process thought, as both maintain a skepticism of the dominant substance ontology of much of mainline Western thinking. In his forward to Nishitani’s masterpiece, Religion and Nothingness, scholar Winston L. King writes that

“One other possibility remains [for dialogue between the Kyoto School and Western thought] in the field of American philosophy, and one that has been slightly explored already. To this writer it seems to have the greatest potential for sustaining a full philosophical-religious contact between Buddhist East and Christian West of any thought pattern in America. This is the so-called process philosophy which had its roots in the thought of A. N. Whitehead, especially in his seminal Process and Reality” (Winston L. King, “Foreward” in Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani, Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, xxi).

This pop-up will examine the specific resources provided by these philosophers of emptiness for collaborating in the project of ecological civilization.

This pop-up will be hosted on Zoom and facilitated by Jared Morningstar. The session will last approximately one hour. Resources pertaining to the topic are linked below as springboards for discussion. Resources pertaining to the topic are provided at the event page linked below as springboards for discussion.

Sponsored by Process & Faith and the Cobb Institute.

To find out more and receive Zoom info…

RSVP NOW

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.

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 - 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.

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.

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…

RSVP NOW

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.
