Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Sunday, August 3, 2014

God as the Poet of Possibilities: Capturing the Spirit of Process Thought in the Improvisational Writing of Our Lives




Novel Theology: Confessions of a Whiteheadian Novelist
http://www.jesusjazzbuddhism.org/novel-theology-confessions-of-a-whiteheadian-novelist.html#.U94gucE9NMw.facebook

by Patricia Adams Farmer
from Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism


“[God] is the poet of world . . . " --A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

"At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy.  The Adventure of the Universe starts with a dream and reaps tragic Beauty." --A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas


THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE SAID about the writer's old adage:

Write the first draft with your heart, and the second with your head.

This is especially true for improvisational writers like me. By improvisational writing, I mean something akin to the jazz artist who, out of the possibilities within a given chord progression, creates a spontaneous melody as she goes along. As both an essayist and novelist, my writing falls into this category, that is, taking a cue from a single thread of an idea and playing it out “as the spirit moves.” If it gels into something coherent, the creative process wins. If not, it can be set aside or discarded. Essays work well this way, often needing only light editing. But the novel--an unwieldy cauldron of multiple personalities--is a whole other story.

Truth be told, the characters in my novels run the show, giving real meaning to the term “character-driven.” (How I envy those who can plot every jot and tittle and stick to it! But, alas, my personality won't allow it.) Of course, I do work from an outline, and yes, I lure my characters in that direction. But they do have a will of their own and a definite say-so in the plot. So I listen and write and let the narrative take its course, constantly readjusting my outline as events unfold. The end result is usually quite different from anything I imagined when I started.

And then comes the re-write . . . 

Once the euphoria of the finished story subsides, reality sets in. Like all first-flush creations born of the enthusiastic heart, first drafts cry out for that second stage of creation, the brass tacks, the hard, analytic thinking. My characters, with their free-wheeling personalities, now have to take a backseat to the pesky realities of logical coherence, continuity, detail, and foreshadowing—not to mention the painful, gritty, mind-numbing work of copy editing. But there’s no getting around it. Creativity must, in the end, give way to craft.

So, with a deep breath and copious amounts of tea, I take the novel as it is, and transform it into what it can be—much like the world of process philosophy. Process theologian Marjorie Suchocki says that God “works with the world as it is, in order to bring it to where it can be.”

Thus, the entire artistic process of writing and re-writing can serve loosely as a metaphor for what Whitehead calls “creative transformation.”

The process world of Alfred North Whitehead is a story unfolding in time with no pre-determined outcome. Many influences are at work in the writing, like strong-willed characters colliding against each other. And yet, every becoming moment of the story also includes a divine urge toward intense harmony. Whitehead calls this Beauty. In fact, the "poet of the world" lures us always and forever toward Beauty. The divine poet beckons and persuades and lures us forward with enticing possibilities, but can never strong-arm a character's action. So, in sense, God works as the improvisational writer works—not as an all-powerful tyrant over characters and plot, determining the outcome from the beginning, but rather as a the poet of possibilities, luring the narrative into realms of richly contrasted Beauty.

When it comes to our individual stories--our personal story within the cosmic story--we choose our own words. And not always with care. Bombarded by a plethora of influences all vying for a place on the page, we make our choices of nouns and verbs, characters and plot, metaphors and meaning, and hope for something close to a happy ending. But things happen. Is it any wonder that we find ourselves in constant need of revision? We ignore the divine lure toward Beauty on a daily basis, sometimes making a holy mess of things. Or, we simply write ourselves into a corner and don’t know how to get out. And even when we do our best to write our stories on the dreams of youth, evil characters lurk among the pages and unforeseen tragedy dismantles our carefully constructed plot.

But thankfully there is always more to the story. God, Whitehead believed, is not only the lure toward Beauty, but the reaper of "tragic Beauty" when the story goes awry. This divine companion—the poet of the world—is our constant co-writer, who is able to take our flawed and fractured lives and re-imagine them into fresh metaphors of meaning. Just as words are alive and open to a thousand interpretations, so the past is alive and breathing, just waiting for a fresh word, an embrace of love, a divine imagination that can re-create out of the wreckage we have wrought.

No, we cannot erase the actual facts of the story we have written—the past—but we can transform those facts into an ongoing story that can still be made beautiful. In fact, isn't that what we love most about stories--the redemption of flawed characters? In this way, no story is really set in stone. All can be redeemed; all can re-interpreted; all can be re-imagined and loved and forgiven and woven into the cosmic story that unfolds under a canopy of stars in a universe of glimmering possibilities.





Social Media Ties & Complex Networks of Interaction







August 1, 2014

How Yahoo Research Labs Studies Culture as a Formal Computational Concept
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/529521/how-yahoo-research-labs-studies-culture-as-a-formal-computational-concept/

The ultimate goal: a truly computational understanding of human society, say Yahoo’s computational anthropologists.

The study of online social networks has revolutionized the way social scientists understand human interaction on a grand scale. It is based on the assumption that the fundamental unit of interaction is the social tie that exists between two individuals. This tie can be a message that one person has sent to another, that one person follows another, that one person “likes” another and so on.

These social ties are the atoms of social network structure. And much of the research on social networks has focused on how these atoms join together to create complex networks of interaction.

Much less thought has been given to the atoms themselves, whether they fall into categories themselves, whether different atoms have different social properties and how combining atoms of different types might be indicative of entirely different relationships.

Today, Luca Maria Aiello at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, and a couple of pals, changed that. They tease apart the nature of the links that form on social networks and say these atoms fall into three different categories. They also show how to extract this information automatically and then characterize the relationships according to the combination of atoms that exist between individuals. Their ultimate goal: to turn anthropology into a full-blooded sub-discipline of computer science.

Aiello and co[mpany] used two data sets from a pair of large social networks. The first consists of over 1 million messages sent between 500,000 pairs of users of the aNobii social network, which people use to talk about books they have read. The second is a set of 100,000 anonymized user pairs who commented on each other’s photos on Flickr, sending around 2 million messages in total.

The team analyzes these messages based on the type of information they convey, which they divide into three groups. The first type of information is related to social status; messages displaying appreciation or announcing the creation of the social tie such as a follow or like. For example, a user might say a photograph is “an excellent shot” or say they’ve followed somebody or acknowledged attention they’ve got by thanking them for visiting a site.

The second category of information involves social support of some kind. The main purpose of a message that falls into this category is to greet or welcome someone to a website, to explicitly express affection or to convey wishes, jokes and laughter.

The final category of information is an exchange of knowledge. Messages that fall into this category share information and personal experience, or ask for opinions and suggestions, or display knowledge of a particular field.

Aiello and co. then develop an algorithm that automatically categorizes the messages sent between individuals according to the content they contain and their similarity to messages of the same type.

Finally, they evaluate the results of the algorithm by asking human editors to assess a sample of 1000 randomly selected messages from each website and label them according to the three categories. They then compared the human choices with the algorithms and found good agreement.

The results of this analysis allow them to work out how often people use the different modes of communication and also how they transition from one to another during a conversation.

They find that in aNobii, the most frequent interactions involve status giving where the archetypal message is “nice library”, referring to a user’s collection of books.

By contrast, Flickr users communicate in a different way. “In Flickr the proportion is very balanced instead, with no domain being predominant on average,” say Aiello and co.

More interesting is the way that social ties evolve over time. Aiello and co. say that status exchange is particularly common in short conversations and at the beginning of longer ones. However, the conversations rapidly evolve into a mix of knowledge exchanges and social support. “It thus appears that status exchange serves to set the foundation for the future relationship, feeding to the interactional background after the tie-formation stage,” say Aiello and co.

That’s a fascinating study that provides a new way of looking at social ties as strings of interactions. In a way, it changes the atomic theory of social ties into a kind of string theory.

Aiello and co. clearly think this should lead to plenty of new insights and they are optimistic about the future. “The ultimate goal of such analysis is the unpacking of “culture” as a formal, computational concept,” they say. And they think of the patterns of strings of interaction as a kind of grammar of society. “We hope our work provides yet another step towards a truly computational understanding of human societies.”

That’s an ambitious goal– a truly computational understanding of human society. Both fantastic and a little frightening the same time.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1407.5547 : Reading the Source Code of Social Ties