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, September 15, 2013

Thinking About the Quantum Mysteries of Life


From time-to-time I love to go "off-subject" and just "think aloud" about the inner workings of our universe. I love science. And especially anything that has to do with mathematics, chemistry and physics. And specifically anything that has to do with the universe, its evolution and inner-workings of the invisible quantum mechanisms at work energizing our daily routines and lives without are merest notice or appreciation. When I think about science I cannot help to then think about the broader implications of it all - of theology and philosophy, biological evolution and societal social dynamics, human vitality, and of the earth's vitality itself. It's all entangled. Primeval. Spiritual. And very human in an earthy-sort-of-way.

Like any potential theorist, we each like to conject and project, speculate and theorize, of possibilities and realities, of beginnings and endings, of things-to-come and things-yet-to-come, towards a future that is here, now, in all of its raw potentiality. And it may be here, within Michio Kaku's hour-long video discussion below, that we might re-discover life's rudimentary physics at work within our own inner worlds and inner workings. Between ourselves with that of other searching selves. And even within our very human imaginations and cathartic needs to amplify God's vibrancy singing through our vibrating lives. It may even cause our thoughts to soar towards all things pertaining to life and being, mystery and paradox, holiness and goodness. Towards all the many good possibilities that this life holds - and even promises to become - that is so lightly held within the grasp of our dying mortal hands and careless souls.

That at the last, by this most exquisite of all explorations we might better approach ourselves, each other, and even our Creator-Redeemer God of the universe with a raw, new, vitality gained from the very exploration itself. Which search might lay within us a more circumspect humbleness - perhaps even a closeness - to the vastness of the empty space that lives between ourselves and hoary time's grand privileging of life's resonating - and oft times, deeply disturbing - images of our poverty and thanklessness. That within this discovery we might perhaps discover the need to seek a more infinite, a more eternal life, wishing to be filled beyond our merest mundane aspirations, livelihoods, and moiling, restive governments. Which might conjoin our more primitive thoughts of mystery-and-possibility to the vaster seas of endless meanings-and-opportunities meant to recover the beginnings-and-endings of this divine life in which we live so thoughtlessly on our bravest days.

Which might instill a grander patience with each other. A more pervasive peace. And perhaps, a better relent of mankind's paucity, charged with protecting and enhancing all-these-many-worlds that we have been given. To nurture these worlds within the provise of our habitation whose darkened wildernesses is ours to remake-and-create by our faithful God's great wisdom and most willing provide. To reach beyond that single equation that would explain all of physic's grandest quantum searches to that single-most spiritual equation expressing all of life itself. To discover that that quantum spiritual equation is Jesus Himself who redeems, reimagines, and would renew all. Even ourselves. And even this old world we live so meanly within its vagaries, poverties, and destitutions. To know that Jesus is that Redeemer God who comes to re-create, heal, and make all things new. That it is in this kind of Resurrecting God who is the grandest equation to the quantum mysteries of this remarkable life we have been given to use or misuse, to complete or make incomplete, to refuse or bow before. Whether we understand it or not. Whether we would try or not. And there find a reclaimed peace that never before existed in our broken hearts until this very moment's grandest eclipse at the burst of that bright-and-morning-star of our existence. That star of David which was broken and bowed before our own brokenness wept until the everlast of days filled upon the risen dawns of new birth like a star burst upon my heart.

R.E. Slater
September 15, 2013




The Same Love
by Paul Baloche



You choose the humble and raise them high
You choose the weak and make them strong
You heal our brokenness inside
And give us life

The same love that set the captives free
The same love that opened eyes to see
Is calling us all by name
You are calling us all by name
The same God that spread the heavens wide
The same God that was crucified
Is calling us all by name
You are calling us all by name

You take the faithless one aside
And speak the words "You are mine"
You call the cynic and the proud
Come to me now

The same love that set the captives free
The same love that opened eyes to see
Is calling us all by name
You are calling us all by name
The same God that spread the heavens wide
The same God that was crucified
Is calling us all by name
You are calling us all by name

Oh oh...

You're calling You're calling
You're calling us to the cross
(Repeat 4x)

The same love that set the captives free
The same love that opened eyes to see
Is calling us all by name
You are calling us all by name
The same God that spread the heavens wide
The same God that was crucified
Is calling us all by name
You are calling us all by name

You're calling You're calling
You're calling us to the cross
You're calling You're calling
You're calling us to the cross



Here Is Our King - David Crowder Band


(Chorus 2x)
Here is our King
Here is our Love
Here is our God who's come to bring us back to him
He is the one,
He is Jesus

(verse 1)
From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground
From where ever searching comes to look itself
A trace of what we're looking for
so be quiet now, and wait

(Pre-Chorus)
The ocean is growing
The tide is coming in
Here it is:

(Chorus 2x)
Here is our King
Here is our Love
Here is our God who's come to bring us back to him
He is the one,
He is Jesus

(verse 2)
And what was said to the rose to make it unfold
Was said to me, here in my chest
So be quiet now, and rest.

(Pre-Chorus)(Chorus 2x)

(Bridge 2x)
Majesty!
Finally!

(chorus 3x)(bridge 1x)



Michio Kaku: The Universe in a Nutshell


Published on Aug 15, 2012
       
The Universe in a Nutshell: The Physics of Everything
Michio Kaku, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY


What if we could find one single equation that explains every force in the universe? Dr. Michio Kaku explores how physicists may shrink the science of the Big Bang into an equation as small as Einstein's "e=mc^2." Thanks to advances in string theory, physics may allow us to escape the heat death of the universe, explore the multiverse, and unlock the secrets of existence. While firing up our imaginations about the future, Kaku also presents a succinct history of physics and makes a compelling case for why physics is the key to pretty much everything.

The Floating University
Originally released September, 2011.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Kathleen Russell, and Elizabeth Rodd