Replies

This is really helpful.

One of the things that opened up for me over the weekend in thinking about the third question is this two-fold idea: one is that we’re in a kind of “stream” of processes that *have* to result in there being different expressions of religious stuff — we have to have Anglicanism over there and Sufism over there — this is what possibility requires to have happen.
At the same time, the particularity of one religion or tradition becomes especially valuable given the incalculable stream of possibilities out there.

Douglas,

THANK YOU! I’m excited to read your piece. I did some more reading in Delio this morning and the chapter had so much in common with process thinking — just slightly different language. Can’t wait to dig in more.

Your website is impressive, too! Will explore some more.

I’ve been dancing on the edges of Franciscan theology in recent years — mostly incidentally. But last summer on a family vacation to Italy, we ended up sharing a table with two Franciscan Friars from Siena College. We talked at length about their approach to the world after Francis. Since then, I’ve been doing more reading and have made initial inquiry with an Episcopal Franciscan order.

What an adventure we’re in.

I think I would tweak your two statements:

“You can’t steer the world from a pulpit these days.”

and

“A place that does steer the world is the public education classroom.”

I mostly agree that the world is less being steered from conventional pulpits (but do not tell this to our Evangelical friends, who still wield enormous influence). I would submit, however, that our current moment is seeing a decentralization (or disintegration) of the pulpit into its social/political equivalents. Every “influencer” on TikTok is at a kind of pulpit. Donald Trump at a podium is at a kind of pulpit.

I have many more doubts about whether the public education classroom is a place where the world is being steered. I am an educator who works with college students who are the product of those classrooms. I think I’ve witnessed a shift from learning and “becoming” to commoditization as a matter of policy.

I see your model in terms of theory and praxis. Possibilities are dreamed, then embodied and enacted; this embodiment and action informs new dreaming.

I would tend to agree. Social religion would perhaps be synonymous with religious populism. I think an alternative would be a kind of religion that has more grounding in something, but which may still be expressed socially. A mob is different from a concert crowd is different from a parade is different from a protest. The content matters and helps define the form.

There’s some applicable stuff at the end of the Possibility and God bonus reading. I’m still wrestling with some of it, but some of what I think is suggested indirectly is that the “movement” of God is to “forgive”/intervene/adopt/convert the “sin” of the cosmos — which I take to be the mutually obstructive things that happen — into positive potentialities in the future. Though the writers admit that evil will never go away.

Hi Dennis,

I see where you are coming from and struggle with it as well. I, too, detect a cognitive leap to God, but take some (dis)comfort in the idea that God is an event who/that is eventing. This doesn’t solve all my problems (or any of them), but it does help. I’m also wading through the reading from Auxier and Herstein about the differences between Whitehead and Hartshorne re: God’s personality. Wading is the right word.

Beautiful work here, y’all.

This is the Episcopalian in my speaking, but for me AO mirrors the idea of “scripture, tradition, and reason” found in how we are to encounter the world/holy/understanding. Of course, Wesley’s quadrilateral adds “experience” (not quite in the Whiteheadian sense).

Fantastic approach!

And how do we describe occasions that are linked to each other? In some process-informed descriptions, I’ve heard what I take to be poetical terms like “unfolding” or “evolving.”

I’m hooked!

Dr. D,

Thanks so much for the recommendation!

Good read and, for me, theologically helpful!

I do think it hinges on the “personality” of the universe, though. Of course a beautiful reality with a kind of personhood would be attracted to a good lover over a manipulative and controlling one. But whether our beautiful reality with that kind of character is the open question.