Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Seeing God in the Color of Blue



Seeing God in the
Color of Blue


I was lost, but now am found
Blind, but now I see
Deaf, without hearing
Dumb, without a voice.

A binary, seeking wholeness
A functionary, unfeeling, unmoved
Unloved, yet learning love
Hopeless, when led untrue.

Stuck, but am rescued
Judged, along paths of doubt
Broken, while deeply healing
Of a past, no longer present.

My song breaks forth
Into shouting, singing
Of innumerable possibilities
Across the broken bowl.

Seamed, and stitched
And healing
Rent, my conflicts
Spent, all ills.

Now this I know, God is Love
Is Love, Is Love, Is Love.
No truth so dear,
No truth so hidden,
When Jesus told God's story
Truer than God's stories past.

R.E. Slater
August 23, 2022



First, My Complaint

Part of Process Philosophy's lack of popularity I blame directly on the process community itself. Whenever it produces "academic-level" books of scholarly value it has lately priced itself beyond the means of the common public. A public which might read more of the process community's thoughts should that knowledge be made much more affordable.

And if so, then we might see many more redactive forms of editing which might make the area of process metaphysics and ethics more understandable and relatable using the parlance of the public. This, of course, would require people like myself, who share an interest in process philosophy and theology, might then be enabled to read this information to then reset it into the vernacular terms of  the reading public in every way imaginable. Whether topical, ethical, morally, politically, ecologically. Or in children's storybooks, elementary and middle school tales of fiction or fact, and for the high school and college reader as premiers, treatises, mythological tales, sci-fi adventures, class struggles, sporting venues, etc.

Simply said, process as a lot to offer and the newer works of scholarship on process studies need to be priced not for academia but for the buying public.

Re-Constituting Narrative Can Become Redemptive

However, not all is lost. Once I had understood the substance and import of a process view of life I now see it everywhere in all the little and large pieces of story and biography, fiction and newspaper, TV and film. Why? Because process is how the world - ahem, the universe - operates. From the small to the large, from the social to the organizational. Process is everywhere about us like the air we breathe into our lungs.

Through the centuries we fail to see it because we are not looking for it. For example, I read somewhere that, as incredible as this sounds, people did not see the color blue. I know. It's hard to imagine because we now see it everywhere including its many hues and variants.

Or, that the lore of the aboriginal speaking to the connectedness of life lay everywhere around us. However, as ignorants we considered the aboriginal cultures as savaged and without value. So we isolated them, killed them, and promptly lost important truths of their cultures which would've added value to any culture, faith, or belief. I think specifically of how human civilization has broken the balances within the Earth and how it is now responding in horrendous climate changes all around the planet.

Need another example of process reality? Just look at the stars themselves which seem so far away from us in the night sky but which have provided across the universe stellar factories of life from their basic ingredients. Not only is humanity made of stardust but so is all of creation. Process says all things are relational, and that all relational things can, and will, impact all things around it. We not only like in a cycle of life, but a cycle which responds to a changing environment adapting itself to the conditions around it.

I imagine that someday, when quantum computers can become self-aware, self-organizing, and self-healing, that they will cross over the boundary of functionaries to imaginaries. That is, the will show curiosity; be able to speculate; choose actions of relational wholeness or brokenness, and exhibit every kind of conscious and spiritual function as we do presently. My hope is... for the better, and not the worse. But with indeterminate freewill also comes the ability to harm the whole as well as to heal the whole.

Behold, The Old is Becoming New

This is process philosophy and theology. But it's more than that. Much more than that. As a metaphysic it informs us of our Creator God, ourselves, nature, and the inter/intra-personal/social relationships lying everywhere around us. When I read of a Platonic-based Westernized form of Semitic Christianity (that is, the gospels of Jesus couched in Judaic-Hellenism) I realize that to read the bible of God back then is not to see the God of the bible now, today, as a more organic, living life-force which is relational, creative, healing, redemptive, loving, and generative. All present Judaic-Christian stories of God back then, as well as through the history of the church, as spoken to a God of wrath, Who judges, condemns, and sends people to hell.

Process Theology, based upon Process Philosophy, approaches the story of God differently. It speaks to a God who is Love, Life, Possibility, and Becoming. That God is not a static relationship but a responding relationship to the present conditions of an evolutionary creation. A static, one-dimensional God who is far-away (transcendent) is not the same as an evolving, many-dimensional God who is immanently near to the very heartbeat of creation. The Psalms of the bible speak to this kind of God but the Hebrew traditions of God failed to grasp the "color of blue" which the writer was ascribing to God.

Again, the narrative of process is sublimely profound and lies everywhere about us. Yet we fail to see it because we have been raised in life to see other things. Necessary things. Perhaps helpful things. But they are pieces of a much larger puzzle. A puzzle a process theology intends to recompose that we might begin to see a processual spiritual universe in even grander ways than we can now imagine. Process then is all about curiosity, creativity, speculation, and coloring outside the lines. Some of those lines keep us within the church's creeds and dogma. For myself, I used those boundaries as guides, began to erase those lines, and am now rewriting the bible as a process narrative of successes and failures in seeing the process Creatorship of our Redeeming God.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
August 23, 2022


PS - The topical index contains a series of marked "INDEXES - Process..." To save time, use these indexes, google search, the search bar here, and the topics listed to rummage through what I feel are the more helpful studies of process philosophy and theology. The books below are but a few of many more process titles and authorships. If they are listed here on this website they are the ones which should be read as I relate my post-evangelical Jesus faith to the world of Arminianism, Open & Relational (Process) Theology, and to Process Theology itself. This journey has taken ten years to get to this point. Hopefully, what is shared within will help many readers to a quicker vision of the God of the bible than of the God who was hidden from my view in important, non-limiting ways than how I had first learned of my faith in Jesus.

- re slater


PSS - I began my readings at the source. Whitehead, John Cobb, etc. Andrew Davis is the latest generation of authors. Hence, Whiteheadian thought may drift from its source or expand brilliantly as it is into its fourth generation of process thinkers. Hence, I will share my readings across both the early realms of process thinking as well as the new realms as I can. The lists below might be grouped as circa 2010-2016 (Studies in Whitehead) and 2019-the present (Davis)
 

* * * * * *


TITLES BY ANDREW M. DAVIS


$8.49

How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere captures for a general audience the spiritual shift away from a God “up there” and “out there” and towards an immanent divine right here. It’s built around the personal journeys of a close-knit group of prominent contributors. Their spiritual visions of immanence, sometimes called “panentheism,” are serving as a path of spiritual return for a growing number of seekers today. Contributors include Deepak Chopra, Richard Rohr, Rupert Sheldrake, Matthew Fox, and Cynthia Bourgeault.

$38.00

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy is an investigation into the nature of ultimacy and explanation, particularly as it relates to the status of, and relationship among Mind, Value, and the Cosmos. It draws its stimulus from longstanding “axianoetic” convictions as to the ultimate status of Mind and Value in the western tradition of philosophical theology, and chiefly from the influential modern proposals of A.N. Whitehead, Keith Ward, and John Leslie. What emerges is a relational theory of ultimacy wherein Mind and Value, Possibility and Actuality, God and the World are revealed as “ultimate” only in virtue of their relationality. The ultimacy of relationality—what Whitehead calls “mutual immanence”—uniquely illuminates enduring mysteries surrounding: any and all existence, necessary divine existence, the nature of the possible, and the world as actual. As such, it casts fresh light upon the whence and why of God, the World, and their ultimate presuppositions.

Propositions in the Making: Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) Nov 13, 2019
by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, Andrew M. Davis, James Burton, Brianne Donaldson, Diego Gil, Susanne Valerie Granzer, Matthew Goulish, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Andrew Murphie, Timothy Murphy, AJ Nocek
$90.48

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions.

Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the world anew. Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. It cannot be reduced to the verbal content of logical justifications, but rather the feeling content of aesthetic valuations. In creatively expressing these propositions in wide relevance to existential, ethical, educational, theological, aesthetic, technological, and societal concerns, the contributors to this volume enact nothing short of “a Whiteheadian Laboratory.”

Process Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy (Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy) Dec 13, 2021
by Andrew M. Davis, Maria-Teresa Teixeira, Wm. Andrew Schwartz
$100.87

This book newly articulates the international and interdisciplinary reach of Whitehead’s organic process cosmology for a variety of topics across science and philosophy, and in dialogue with a variety historical and contemporary voices. Integrating Whitehead’s thought with the insights of Bergson, James, Pierce, Merleau-Ponty, Descola, Fuchs, Hofmann, Grof and many others, contributors from around the world reveal the relevance of process philosophy to physics, cosmology, astrobiology, ecology, metaphysics, aesthetics, psychedelics, and religion. A global collection, this book expresses multivocal possibilities for the development of process cosmology after Whitehead.

Nature in Process: Organic Proposals in Philosophy, Society, and Religion Feb 28, 2022
by Andrew M. Davis, Maria-Teresa Teixeira, Wm. Andrew Schwartz
Paperback
$24.00
More Buying Choices
$23.80 (10 Used & New offers)





by Roland Faber, Andrew M Davis
Hardcover - $62.00
More Buying Choices - $50.86 (10 Used & New offers)
Paperback - $34.92
More Buying Choices - $26.69 (19 Used & New offers)






* * * * * *


TITLES IN CONTEMPORARY WHITEHEAD STUDIES



Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (March 22, 2012)
Kindle - $91.20
Hardcover - $103.40

This volume is based on the first set of formal conversations which brings together the dynamic philosophies of two eminent thinkers: Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Each has drawn from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. In bringing together internationally renowned interpreters of Butler and Whitehead from a variety of fields and disciplines—philosophy, rhetoric, gender and queer studies, religion, literary and political theory—the editors hope to set a standard for the relevance of interdisciplinary philosophical discourse today. This volume offers a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts, by reaching beyond their closed circles toward understandings that may serve as the basis for the activation of humanity today. Considered together, Butler and Whitehead delineate a whole new cadre of approaches to long-standing problems as well as never-before asked questions in the humanities.


Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (June 20, 2013)
by Michael Epperson (Author) , Elias Zafiris (Author)
Kindle - $42.00
Hardcover - $117.74
Paperback - $56.75

If there is a central conceptual framework that has reliably borne the weight of modern physics as it ascends into the 21st century, it is the framework of quantum mechanics. Because of its enduring stability in experimental application, physics has today reached heights that not only inspire wonder, but arguably exceed the limits of intuitive vision, if not intuitive comprehension. For many physicists and philosophers, however, the currently fashionable tendency toward exotic interpretation of the theoretical formalism is recognized not as a mark of ascent for the tower of physics, but rather an indicator of sway--one that must be dampened rather than encouraged if practical progress is to continue.

In this unique two-part volume, designed to be comprehensible to both specialists and non-specialists, the authors chart out a pathway forward by identifying the central deficiency in most interpretations of quantum mechanics, and indeed, in modern philosophy more generally: That in the conventional, metrical depiction of extension, inherited from the Enlightenment, objects are characterized as fundamental to relations--i.e., such that relations presuppose objects but objects do not presuppose relations. The authors, by contrast, argue that in quantum mechanics physical extensiveness fundamentally entails not only relations of objects, but also relations of relations. In this way, quantum mechanics exemplifies a concept of extensive connection that it is fundamentally topological rather than metrical, and thus requires a logico-mathematical framework grounded in category theory rather than set theory.

By this thesis, the fundamental quanta of quantum physics are properly defined as units of logico-physical relation rather than merely units of physical relata as is the current convention. Objects are always understood as relata, and likewise relations are always understood objectively. Objects and relations are thus coherently defined as mutually implicative. The conventional notion of a history as 'a story about fundamental objects' is thereby reversed, such that the classical 'objects' become the story by which we understand physical systems that are fundamentally histories of quantum events.

These are just a few of the novel critical claims explored in this volume--claims whose exemplification in quantum mechanics will, the authors argue, serve more broadly as foundational principles for the philosophy of nature as it evolves through the 21st century and beyond.

The Divine Manifold (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (July 30, 2014)
by Roland Faber (Author)
Kindle - $151.11
Hardcover - $141.64

The Divine Manifold is a postmodern enquiry in intersecting themes of the concept and reality of multiplicity in a chaosmos that does not refuse a dimension of theopoetics, but rather defines it in terms of divine polyphilia, the love of multiplicity. In an intricate play on Dante’s Divine Comedy, this book engages questions of religion and philosophy through the aporetic dynamics of love and power, locating its discussions in the midst of, and in between the spheres of a genuine philosophy of multiplicity. This philosophy originates from the poststructuralist approach of Gilles Deleuze and the process philosophical inspirations of Alfred N. Whitehead. As their chaosmos invites questions of ultimate reality, religious pluralism and multireligious engagement, a theopoetics of love will find paradoxical dissociations and harmonizations with postmodern sensitivities of language, power, knowledge and embodiment. At the intersection of poststructuralism’s and process theology’s insights in the liberating necessity of multiplicity for a postmodern cosmology, the book realizes its central claim. If there is a divine dimension of the chaosmos, it will not be found in any identification with mundane forces or supernatural powers, but on the contrary in the absolute difference of polyphilic love from creativity. Yet, the concurrent indifference of love and power—its mystical undecidability in terms of any conceptualization—will lead into existential questions of the insistence on multiplicity in a world of infinite becoming as inescapable background for its importance and creativeness, formulating an ecological and ethical impulse for a mystagogy of becoming intermezzo.
Kindle - $91.75
Hardcover - $96.58

Despite there being deep lines of convergence between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and other classical American philosophers, it remains an open question whether Whitehead is a pragmatist, and conversation between pragmatists and Whitehead scholars have been limited. Indeed, it is difficult to find an anthology of classical American philosophy that includes Whitehead’s writings. These camps began separately, and so they remain. This volume questions the wisdom of that separation, exploring their connections, both historical and in application. The essays in this volume embody original and creative work by leading scholars that not only furthers the understanding of American philosophy, but seeks to advance it by working at the intersection of experience and reality to incite novel and creative thought. This exploration is long overdue. Specific questions that are addressed are: Is Whitehead a pragmatist? What contrasts and affinities exist between American pragmatism and Whitehead’s thought? What new questions, strategies, and critiques emerge by juxtaposing their distinct perspectives?

Kindle - $85.78
Hardcover - $78.28

Metaphysics—or the grand narratives about reality that shape a community—has historically been identified as one of the primary oppressive factors in violence against animals, the environment, and other subordinated populations. Yet, this rejection of metaphysics has allowed inadequate worldviews to be smuggled back into secular rights-based systems, and into politics, language, arts, economics, media, and science under the guise of value-free and narrowly human-centric facts that relegate many populations to the margins and exclude them from consideration as active members of the planetary community. Those concerned with systemic violence against creatures and other oppressed populations must overcome this allergy to metaphysics in order to illuminate latent assumptions at work in their own worldviews, and to seek out dynamic, many-sided, and relational narratives about reality that are more adequate to a universe of responsive and creative world-shaping creatures. This text examines two such worldviews—Whitehead’s process-relational thought in the west and the nonviolent Indian tradition of Jainism—alongside theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, that offer a new perspective on metaphysics as well as the creaturely kin and planetary fellows with whom we co-shape our future.

Hardcover - $108.14
Paperback - $54.99

The present volume endeavors to make a contribution to contemporary Whitehead studies by clarifying his axiological process metaphysics, including his theory of values, concept of aesthetic experience, and doctrine of beauty, along with his philosophy of art, literature and poetry. Moreover, it establishes an east-west dialogue focusing on how Alfred North Whitehead’s process aesthetics can be clarified by the traditional Japanese Buddhist sense of evanescent beauty. As this east-west dialogue unfolds it is shown that there are many striking points of convergence between Whitehead’s process aesthetics and the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. However, the work especially focuses on two of Whitehead’s aesthetic categories, including the penumbral beauty of darkness and the tragic beauty of perishability, while further demonstrating parallels with the two Japanese aesthetic categories of yûgen and aware. It is clarified how both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition have articulated a poetics of evanescence that celebrates the transience of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty. Finally it is argued that both Whitehead and Japanese tradition develop an aesthetics of beauty as perishability culminating in a religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its reconciliation in the supreme ecstasy of peace or nirvana.

Hardcover - $76.61

As with any rich philosophical tradition in a period of intensive growth, process philosophy may seem confusing to the uninitiated, or even to the initiated. There is simply so much going on that one may, so to speak, lose the forest for the trees. The purpose of this book is to organize and arrange selected examples of contemporary work in process philosophy, with opening commentaries by leading Whiteheadian scholars, to give the reader a taste of the global vision of process currently expressed within this field of philosophy.

This book is split into two parts: the first discussing the historical roots of and future perspectives for basic concepts of process thinking, and the second presenting original contemporary work in extending and re-interpreting the basic metaphysical structure of process.

Hardcover - $77.24
Paperback - $39.99

This book examines how the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a speculative philosopher from the first half of the twentieth century, converses and entangles itself with continental philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries around the question of a sustainable civilization in the present. Chapters are focused around economic and environmental sustainability, questions of how technology and systems relate to this sustainability, relationships between human and nonhuman entities, relationships among humans, and how larger philosophical questions lead one to think differently about what the terms sustainable and civilization mean. The book aims to uncover and explore ways in which the combination of these philosophies might provide the “dislocations” within thought that lead to novel ways of being and acting in the world.

Hardcover - $86.97

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions.

Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the world anew. Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. It cannot be reduced to the verbal content of logical justifications, but rather the feeling content of aesthetic valuations. In creatively expressing these propositions in wide relevance to existential, ethical, educational, theological, aesthetic, technological, and societal concerns, the contributors to this volume enact nothing short of “a Whiteheadian Laboratory.”

Kindle - $37.70
Hardcover - $82.47
Paperback - $39.99

In Whitehead's Radically Temporalist Metaphysics: Recovering the Seriousness of Time, George Allan argues that Whitehead’s introduction of God into his process metaphysics renders his metaphysics incoherent. This notion of God, who is the reason for both stability and progressive change in the world and who is both the infinite source of novel possibilities and the everlasting repository for the finite values, inserts into a reality that is supposedly composed solely of finite entities an entity both infinite and everlasting. By eliminating this notion of God, Allan draws on the temporalist foundation of Whitehead’s views to recover a metaphysics that takes time seriously. By turning to Whitehead’s later writings, Allan shows how this interpretation is developed into an expanded version of the radically temporalist hypothesis, emphasizing the power of finite entities, individually and collectively, to create, sustain, and enhance the dynamic world of which we are a creative part.

Hardcover - $87.15
Paperback - $39.99

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy is an investigation into the nature of ultimacy and explanation, particularly as it relates to the status of, and relationship among Mind, Value, and the Cosmos. It draws its stimulus from longstanding “axianoetic” convictions as to the ultimate status of Mind and Value in the western tradition of philosophical theology, and chiefly from the influential modern proposals of A.N. Whitehead, Keith Ward, and John Leslie. What emerges is a relational theory of ultimacy wherein Mind and Value, Possibility and Actuality, God and the World are revealed as “ultimate” only in virtue of their relationality. The ultimacy of relationality—what Whitehead calls “mutual immanence”—uniquely illuminates enduring mysteries surrounding: any and all existence, necessary divine existence, the nature of the possible, and the world as actual. As such, it casts fresh light upon the whence and why of God, the World, and their ultimate presuppositions.

Kindle - $40.50
Hardcover - $101.97
Paperback - $42.99

In Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context, Timothy E. Eastman proposes a new creative synthesis, the Logoi framework—which is radically inclusive and incorporates both actuality and potentiality—to show how the fundamental notions of process, logic, and relations, woven with triads of input-output-context and quantum logical distinctions, can resolve a baker’s dozen of age-old philosophic problems. Further, Eastman leverages a century of advances in quantum physics and the Relational Realism interpretation pioneered by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris and augmented by the independent research of Ruth Kastner and Hans Primas to resolve long-standing issues in understanding quantum physics. Adding to this, Eastman makes use of advances in information and complex systems, semiotics, and process philosophy to show how multiple levels of context, combined with relations—including potential relations—both local and local-global, can provide a grounding for causation, emergence, and physical law. Finally, the Logoi framework goes beyond standard ways of knowing—that of context independence (science) and context focus (arts, humanities)—to demonstrate the inevitable role of ultimate context (meaning, spiritual dimension) as part of a transformative ecological vision, which is urgently needed in these times of human and environmental crises.

What Is Process Thought?: Seven Answers to Seven Questions Paperback – January 28, 2021
by Jay McDaniel (Author)

Science and everyday experience increasingly demonstrate that ours is a dynamic, interconnected, relational universe. It was the great insight of Alfred North Whitehead that we need a philosophy to match this understanding. That he succeeded in this is hampered by the complexity of his ideas and the words he used to describe it. In What Is Process Thought, Jay McDaniel easily overcomes this difficulty. Using metaphor, imagery, and examples from everyday life, McDaniel brings the “aha” experience of understanding to readers, whether process thought is new to them or already familiar. Old-order thinking has brought us to the precarity of geopolitical crises and climate change. If we are to survive, we must make the shift from substance-mechanistic thinking to process-relational thinking. This little book is a gateway to that great and necessary shift.



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