Replies

Greetings Reinder! Thank you for joining this course – and especially for sharing your interest in indigenous traditions/ways. I’m also eager to hear from Chris Daniels on this. I recently discovered the work of Dr. Randy Woodley, who is Cherokee, and is speaking during the upcoming Center for Open and Relational Theology’s ORTLine event Feb. 10-11. You can get to the EventBrite link for tickets to that here https://c4ort.com/. I just ordered Woodley’s book Becoming Rooted, but he has several that all look good.
Looking forward to engaging these topics with you!
Sheri

Hello Charlene!
Welcome to the course! So glad that you are with us. It sounds like your relationship with your lead minister is much like the one I had with the pastor of my Lutheran church in Marietta, GA where I moved after college. I also have enjoyed those same authors. Though I wasn’t deconstructing a fundamentalist background, I had a lot of theological questions. Looking forward to getting to know you better.
Sheri

Hello Bill!
So glad to have a fellow guitarist in our midst! Thanks for being part of this course. I’m sure your perspective as a neuroscientist will add a lot to our discussions. I share many of your interests. Looking forward to moving through the class with you.
Sheri

Greetings Weidong,
I’m so glad that you joined the course! I know you will be a gift to us in bringing your perspective from Chinese culture and traditional religions. It also sounds like you are engaging in a beautiful way with your village and the earth, not to mention your beautiful openness to learning new things. You are an inspiration!
Sheri

Hello Rolla,
Thank you for being part of this course! So nice to learn more about your background – even though you are very familiar to me from other gatherings, it’s wonderful to learn more. I love your walking practice and engagement with your neighbor. What gifts I imagine you are to each other.
Looking forward to hearing from you as we move through the class.
Sheri

Hello Elizabeth,
So nice to meet you here in this forum. I love your term “pan-compassionist”! That resonates very strongly with me as well. And what an interesting journey you have had! Looking forward to interacting with you in the class.
Sheri

Thank you for these thoughts, Cindy! I’m sorry, but I didn’t see this post until this evening but I do appreciate your sharing.
Sheri

Wow, Kenneth, I’m truly moved by what you’ve written to your son. I’m so pleased that you felt a deep connection to what I had to say, and I hope our content continues to unfold in you in a soulful way.
I’m currently in the process of preparing to launch a program for women’s personal and professional development called Transforming Women, and so my immediate future – in addition to the Spring class for the Cobb Institute – is to launch an offering or two under that plan.
But the next thing that I’ll be looking to do is to create a program for people seeking a spiritual pathway who are not drawn to the traditional faith communities. My thinking is that I will create some kind of introductory course that will then lead into a membership community with online gatherings and maybe also offering in-person retreats at some point.
I would love to hear from people who might fit that bill – like your son – on what their key spiritual questions are, what issues they struggle with, what would be meaningful, etc. Please feel free to urge him to email me at sheridkling@gmail.com or he can also reach out through the website.

Thank you so much for your kind words and your engagement in the class. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being with this group for these last 6 weeks.

Ken, you might want to check out the work of Jeffrey Long who does make some of those connections. very valuable for sure!
There are just too many good ideas and scholarly threads to follow and not nearly enough hours in the day!

Hi Kenneth,
I have kind of a two-pronged focus in my work in general (though not for this class specifically). I’m interested in articulating forms of faith that reconnect Christians to their symbolic life and to recover what Jesus was pointing to. (Jesus as the finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself). I’m also interested in a transreligious approach that might speak to people who are not affiliated with any tradition but who are seeking encounter with the sacred. At my core, I agree 100% with Karl Rahner that “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.” And so I’m most interested in direct experience of the holy much more than I am in any particular religious forms.

I love this piece from chapter 6 on Jesus Christ in Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition by John Cobb and David Ray Griffin: “We judge that Christian meaning can best be made alive today through a truly contemporary vision of the world that is at the same time truly Christian. We are not so much concerned that the forms and language of the past be preserved as that the faith come fully to life in relation to our needs and opportunities. Whitehead seems to us at once to provide a brilliant contemporary vision and to make our faith live in a new way.”

In addition, regarding scripture, you might look into the work of Doug King at Presence. I find his incredibly deep knowledge of the biblical narrative and his weaving it together with spiral dynamics to be very impressive and exciting. You can find videos about his “integral theology” at this website, and he also has a podcast that you can find on iTunes and elsewhere called Presence. https://www.presence.tv/

See you tomorrow!

Hello Byron! Thanks for these great thoughts and contributions to our class discussion. First, let me say that the difference between coincidence and synchronicity is that the synchronicity is meaningful to the one observing it. There could be a simple coincidence that occurs, say, for example that two friends who had not seen each other in a long time just happened to show up at the same coffee shop at the same time. What would make that a synchronicity might be that person A had had a dream about person B the night before and was thinking about wanting to see them. It’s the mirroring in the outer world something that is meaningful in our inner world that makes it a synchronicity. I’d also like to suggest that we might see something happening “for us” in a process worldview without that being the result of a controlling God. Who’s to say that God didn’t lure those goldfinches to that place at that very moment, and they responded? Or who’s to say that my internal relations with the natural world around me in that moment, and my prayer to God and the world for a “nature moment” wasn’t felt by the world around me itself? In that sense, prayer could be effective both because we can then become effective factors in the lives of the people we pray for (as Marjorie Suchocki writes, suggesting that God can include us in God’s initial aims when we offer prayers) through God, but also because our prayers from a millisecond ago are actually felt by the world around us, prehended by it, and become lures for feeling for a response.
And I do agree with you that God can be surprised, in the sense that God does not know the future, but only knows what is possible to be known at any given moment. But I do believe that because God feels the world and its suffering and joy from a perspective that is the most holistic possible, that God may have much more of an inkling of what might happen then we can ever hope to have.
As for the PN vs the CN of God, God definitely feels the world through God’s physical pole, the CN. God then conceptualizes possibilities for each moment as it is arising based on its current conditions, and offers the best possibility. But God’s “goal” is for intensity of experience, contrast, and enjoyment or zest. We might even say adventure. But the PN is also unconscious, so that’s a factor as well, according to Whitehead.

Those are beautiful thoughts Ken. Thank you for sharing this. I too tend to distinguish between the historical Jesus and the Cosmic Christ, and see Jesus as incarnating the synthesis of Logos and Sophia.
I love reflecting on these kinds of ideas.
Sheri

Hello Byron!
Wow, thank you so much for sharing your story and what you have encountered along your journey. I want to commend you for the work you have done to understand yourself and make changes to your life. I am so gratified to hear that you are enjoying the course and finding meaning in it. I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts as you continue!
Sheri

Just came across this quote from a previous Facebook post:

“We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veied Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life.” ~Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book One

I’m 100% with you Doug. It’s mystifying to me how this thinking seems to be denied by so many.