Compiled by R.E. Slater
One of the early process figures with John Cobb after Whitehead and Hartshorn was David Griffin. Below are his titles produced over seventy some years.
David Ray Griffin
An Introduction to Process Theology
http://www.whitehead2015.com - Seizing an Alternative Conference David Ray Griffin: "An Introduction to Process Theology"
Anthology of David Ray Griffin
- A process Christology, Westminster Press, 1973, ISBN 0-664-20978-5
- Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, with John B. Cobb, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976, ISBN 0-664-24743-1
- John Cobb's Theology in Process, Westminster John Knox Press, 1977, ISBN 0-664-21292-1
- Process and Reality, Free Press; 2nd edition, 1979, ISBN 0-02-934570-7
- Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine and Process Philosophy, State University of New York Press, 1986, ISBN 0-88706-115-X
- The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State Univ of New York Press, 1988, ISBN 0-88706-784-0
- Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1988, ISBN 0-88706-853-7
- Varieties of Postmodern Theology (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1989, ISBN 0-7914-0050-6
- God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology (Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1989, ISBN 0-88706-929-0
- Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, Northwestern University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8101-0815-1
- Sacred Interconnections: Postmodern Spirituality, Political Economy and Art (SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1990, ISBN 0-7914-0231-2
- Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1990, ISBN 0-7914-0198-7
- God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy, University Press of America, 1991, ISBN 0-8191-7687-7
- Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations, State University of New York Press, 1991, ISBN 0-7914-0612-1
- Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne (SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1993, ISBN 0-7914-1333-0
- Postmodern Politics for a Planet in Crisis: Policy, Process, and Presidential Vision (SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1993, ISBN 0-7914-1485-X
- Jewish Theology and Process Thought (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2810-9
- Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 1997, ISBN 0-7914-3315-3
- Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion), Cornell University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8014-3778-4
- Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought), State University of New York Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7914-4563-1
- Process Theology and the Christian Good News: A Response to Classical Free Will Theism in 'Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists', Cobb and Pinnock (editors), Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-8028-4739-0
- Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, ISBN 0-664-22773-2
- Deep Religious Pluralism, Westminster John Knox Press, 2005, ISBN 0-664-22914-X
- Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (SUNY Series in Philosophy), State University of New York Press, 2007, ISBN 0-7914-7049-0
- Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007, ISBN 978-1-55635-755-8
- Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism: Rethinking Evil, Morality, Religious Experience, Religious Pluralism, and the Academic Study of Religion, Claremont, Process Century Press, 2014, ISBN 1-9404-4703-8
- The Christian Gospel for Americans: A Systematic Theology, Anoka (Minnesota): Process Century Press, 2019, ISBN 1-9404-4742-9
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1973 - This book, originally published by The Westminster Press in 1973, was the first full-scale Christology based upon process thought. Its Whitehead's process philosophy provides a basis for explicating the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is God's decisive self-revelation, in a manner that is consistent with both modern thought and Christian faith. A Process Christology brings together three dimensions of recent the new quest for the historical Jesus, the new-orthodox emphasis on God's self-revealing activity in history, and the theology based primarily on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. This edition contains a new Preface.
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1976 - Process Theology is an introductory exposition of the theological movement that has been strongly influenced by the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. It offers an interpretation of the basic concepts of process philosophy and outlines a "process theology" that will be especially useful for students of theology, teachers of courses in contemporary philosophy, ministers, and those interested in current theological and philosophical trends.
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1979 - One of the major philosophical texts of the 20th century, Process and Reality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s influential lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the 1920s on process philosophy.
Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant.
The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds.
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Challenges the conventional view of time
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1988 - This book takes a genuinely new spiritual stance reflecting the emergence of a post-modern science and differing from the relativistic nihilism that calls itself postmodern but is really modernism extended to its limit.
Based on a direct experience of reality as divine, this postmodern spirituality transcends modernity's individualism and patriarchy, its forced choices between dualism and materialism, anthropocentrism and relativism, supernaturalism and atheism, intolerance and nihilism. Bringing moral and ethical values back into rational discourse, this book provides a critique of various aspects of modern society--political, economic, social, agricultural, and technological aspects. This criticism, informed by the postmodern worldview, points toward a more satisfying form of personal existence and a sustainable form of global order.
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1989 - his book sorts out the confusion created by the use of the term "postmodern" in relation to widely divergent theological positions. Four different types of postmodern theology are distinguished in the preface: constructive, deconstructive, liberationist, and conservative. Two forms of each type are discussed in the book.
Writing from a constructive, postmodern perspective, the authors enter into dialogue with the deconstructive postmodernism of Mark C. Taylor and Jean-François Lyotard, with the liberationist postmodernism of Harvey Cox and Cornel West, and with the conservative postmodernism of George William Rutler and John Paul II.
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1989 - Addressed to readers who have found liberal theology empty or who believe that one cannot be religious and fully rational and empirical at the same time.
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1990 - Archetypal Process is a pioneering study linking the ideas of process philosophy, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, with the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung and James Hillman. This is the first work to examine the interconnections of these two modes of thought.
Archetypal Process examines the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground archetypal psychology in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought, and finally, it adds a much-needed feminist perspective to the debate.
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1990 - This book shows the interconnections between postmodernism, religion, politics, economics, and art. It shows that the awareness of interconnectedness is at the center of the postmodern sensibility. Sacred Interconnections illustrates the rejection of the modern idea that these subjects can be discussed as separate disciplines.
While the term "postmodern" has been widely used for deconstructive, cynical, even nihilistic attitude, especially in the world of art and literature, the book represents the emergence of a reconstructive, reenchanting postmodernism, even within the artistic and literary circles.
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1990 - In this book, Huston Smith and David Ray Griffin propose religious philosophies to succeed the waning worldview of modernity. Huston Smith proposes the perennial philosophy or primordial tradition, and David Ray Griffin offers postmodern process theology. The ultimate issue debated is whether we should return to a traditional religious philosophy or seek a new never-before-articulated worldview.
The debate covers the following issues: the relation of Christianity to other religions; the ultimate reality of a personal God in relation to a transpersonal absolute; the ultimate reality of time and progress; the problem of evil; the nature of immortality; the relation of humans to nature; the relation of science to theology; the relation of upward to downward causation; and the possibility of nonrelativistic criteria for deciding between competing worldviews.
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1991 - The baffling age-old question, if there is a good God, why is there evil in the world? has troubled ordinary people and great thinkers for centuries. God, Power, and Evil illuminates the issues by providing both a critical historical survey of theodicy as presented in the works of major Western philosophers and theologians--Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Luther, Calvin, Leibniz, Barth, John Hick, James Ross, Fackenheim, Brunner, Berkeley, Albert Knudson, E. S. Brighton, and others--and a brilliant constructive statement of an understanding of theodicy written from the perspective of the process philosophical and theological thought inspired primarily by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.
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1991 - In this book Griffin responds to critiques of his earlier work—God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy—and discusses ways in which his position has changed in the intervening years. In so doing, he examines the problem of evil, theodicy, and philosophical theology, and contrasts traditional theism and process theism with regard to the question of omnipotence.
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1993 - This is, perhaps, one of the most important books written of the decade (90s). At the "end of the modern age" and the deconstructionist movement, this book explains what should happen "after the deconstruction takes place". This argument for a pan-experiential world view finds common ground between the vitalism of the pre-modern age and the determinism of the modern age. The dynamic synthesis leads one to anticipate, with excitement a re-constructive age where all experience is embraced; the scientific and verifiable built on the heart of the spirit. This work anticipates that aesthetics will take center stage in the new age.
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1993 - This book argues that the planetary crisis, which has been produced by modernity, demands a postmodern politics, especially in the United States, the chief embodiment and exporter of modernity. What is needed is an America that promotes a new world order that is genuinely new—one based on a concern for the human race as a whole, and on a sustainable relationship between the human species and the rest of the biosphere. John B. Cobb, Jr., Richard Falk, David Ray Griffin, Wes Jackson, Frank Kelly, Frances Moore Lappé, Joanna Macy, Douglas Sloan, Jim Wallis, and Roger Wilkins write about various dimensions of this postmodern politics, including its educational aims, morality, time-consciousness, and ecological sensibility, its agricultural and other environmental policies, its truly democratic process, and a postmodern presidency. This book provides the most complete prescription yet for the kind of presidential leadership we need and the kind of transformation in the body politic necessary to evoke and complement such leadership.
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1996 - This collection constitutes the first extended discussion of the relationship between Judaism and process thought. In the last half century the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne have become important sources for contemporary theological reflection. Recently, a number of Jewish thinkers have examined process thought as a potentially valuable resource for postmodern Jewish theology. This book brings together many Jewish thinkers who have pioneered this discussion. Jewish thinkers who have found process thought to be a useful framework for contemporary Jewish thought discuss issues that are primarily theological, such as God's transcendence and immanence, the problem of evil, the idea of revelation. Also included is a dialogue between Jewish and Christian thinkers on the appropriateness of process thought for their religious traditions. Critical reflection on the continuities and discontinuities between Judaism and the process model is also covered.
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1997 - Examines why parapsychology has been held in disdain by scientists, philosophers, and theologians, explores the evidence for ESP, psychokinesis, and life after death, and suggests that these phenomena provide support for a meaningful postmodern spirituality.
"This elegantly written book shows a greater command of the empirical data than any other work on the subject by a philosopher, and no other philosophical work on the survival of death deals with the conceptual issues with greater subtlety or thoroughness." -- Stephen E. Braude, author of ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination and The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science
br>In this book, David Ray Griffin, best known for his work on the problem of evil, turns his attention to the even more controversial topic of parapsychology. Griffin examines why scientists, philosophers, and theologians have held parapsychology in disdain and argues that neither a priori philosophical attacks nor wholesale rejection of the evidence can withstand scrutiny.
After articulating a constructive postmodern philosophy that allows the parapsychological evidence to be taken seriously, Griffin examines this evidence extensively. He identifies four types of repeatable phenomena that suggest the reality of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Then, on the basis of a nondualistic distinction between mind and brain, which makes the idea of life after death conceivable, he examines five types of evidence for the reality of life after death: messages from mediums; apparitions; cases of the possession type; cases of the reincarnation type; and out-of-body experiences. His philosophical and empirical examinations of these phenomena suggest that they provide support for a postmodern spirituality that overcomes the thinness of modern religion without returning to supernaturalism.
"This is a very thorough integration of the data from parapsychology, both experimental and anecdotal, into the philosophical discussions concerning the nature and role of consciousness. The scholarship is sound, and the issues raised in this book are very hot topics in the academic community, especially among philosophers and cognitive scientists." -- Richard S. Broughton, Director, Institute for Parapsychology
"An informative book about parapsychology that I can recommend highly to all philosophers and theologians." -- Ian Stevenson, M.D., Carlson Professor of Psychiatry, University of Virginia Health Sciences Center
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2000 - Occasionally, a book comes along that is definitive for its field of study, a book that marks a milestone in thought.... Griffin has written just such a book―a book that, by all rights, should mark a watershed in the academic study of religion.... Griffin makes about as strong a case as one can in a single volume for a genuine and viable alternative. ― The Journal of Religion
The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne has made many distinctive contributions to the philosophy of religion. David Ray Griffin now offers the first full-scale philosophy of religion written from this perspective, discussing such topics as the relationship between science and religion, the validity of religious experience, the nature and existence of God, religious pluralism, creation and evolution, and the problem of evil. Griffin's clear and comprehensive book also serves as a valuable introduction to process philosophy itself.
In his vigorous defense of a worldview that is fully naturalistic and fully religious, Griffin shows not only how this position reconciles naturalism with freedom, genuine religious experience, and even life after death, but also how its naturalistic theism "reenchants" the world in the sense of providing cosmic support for moral values.
Highly original and sometimes controversial, Griffin's book develops its stance in conversation with influential proponents of other philosophical positions, including William P. Alston, Jürgen Habermas, John Hick, Colin McGinn, Alvin Plantinga, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, Ninian Smart, Jeffrey Stout, and Bernard Williams.
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2000 - Winner of the 2000 Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize
In this book, David Ray Griffin argues that the perceived conflict between science and religion is based upon a double mistake-the assumption that religion requires supernaturalism and that scientific naturalism requires atheism and materialism.
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2000 - Process Theology and the Christian Good News: A Response to Classical Free Will Theism in 'Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists', Cobb and Pinnock (editors), Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-8028-4739-0
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2004 - Furthering his contribution to the science and religion debate, David Ray Griffin draws upon the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead and proposes a radical synthesis between two worldviews sometimes thought wholly incompatible. He argues that the traditions designated by the names "scientific naturalism" and "Christian faith" both embody a great truth--a truth of universal validity and importance--but that both of these truths have been distorted, fueling the conflict between the visions of the scientific and Christian communities. Griffin contends, however, that there is no inherent conflict between science, or even the kind of naturalism that it properly presupposes, and the Christian faith, understood in terms of the primary doctrines of the Christian good news.
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2004 - Foreword by Mary Ann Meyers Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the doctrine of panentheism - the belief that the world is contained within the Divine, although God is also more than the world. Here for the first time leading scientists and theologians meet to debate the merits of this compelling new understanding of the God-world relation. Atheist and theist, Eastern and Western, conservative and liberal, modern and postmodern, physicist and biologist, Orthodox and Protestant - the authors explore the tensions between traditional views of God and contemporary science and ask whether panentheism provides a more credible account of divine action for our age. Their responses, which vary from deeply appreciative to sharply critical, are preceded by an overview of the history and key tenets of panentheism and followed by a concluding evaluation and synthesis.
Contributors: Joseph A. Bracken, Michael W. Brierley, Philip Clayton, Paul Davies, Celia E. Deane-Drummond, Denis Edwards, Niels Henrik Gregersen, David Ray Griffin, Robert L. Herrmann, Christopher C. Knight, Andrew Louth Harold, J. Morowitz, Alexei V. Nesteruk, Ruth Page, Arthur Peacocke, Russell S.
2005 - A groundbreaking scholarly work, Deep Religious Pluralism is based on the conviction that the philosophy articulated by Alfred North Whitehead encourages not only religious diversity but deep religious pluralism. Arising from a 2003 Center for Process Studies conference at Claremont Graduate University, this book offers an alternative to the version of religious pluralism that has dominated the recent discussion, especially among Christian thinkers in the West, which has evoked a growing call to reject pluralism as such.
Renowned contributors of a diversity of faiths include: Steve Odin, John Shunji Yakota, Sandra B. Lubarsky, Jeffery D. Long, Mustafa Ruzgar, Christopher Ives, Michael Lodahl, Chung-ying Cheng, Wang Shik Jang, and John B. Cobb Jr.
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2006 - Probing disturbing questions that beg for a response from the Christian community, distinguished scholar of religion and popular writer David Ray Griffin provides a hard-hitting analysis of the official accounts of the events of September 11, 2001. A tireless investigator, Griffin has sorted through enormous amounts of government and independent data and brought to the surface some very unsettling inconsistencies about what really happened. In this, his latest book, he analyzes the evidence on 9/11 and then explores a distinctively Christian perspective on these issues, taking seriously what we know about Jesus' life, death, and teachings. Drawing a parallel between the Roman Empire of antiquity and the American Empire of today, he applies Jesus' teachings to the current political administration, and he explores how Christian churches, as a community intending to be an incarnation of the divine, can and should respond.
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2007 - Examines the postmodern implications of Whitehead’s metaphysical system. Postmodern philosophy is often dismissed as unintelligible, self-contradictory, and as a passing fad with no contribution to make to the problems faced by philosophers in our time. While this characterization may be true of the type of philosophy labeled postmodern in the 1980s and 1990s, David Ray Griffin argues that Alfred North Whitehead had formulated a radically different type of postmodern philosophy to which these criticisms do not apply. Griffin shows the power of Whitehead’s philosophy in dealing with a range of contemporary issues—the mind-body relation, ecological ethics, truth as correspondence, the relation of time in physics to the (irreversible) time of our lives, and the reality of moral norms. He also defends a distinctive dimension of Whitehead’s postmodernism, his theism, against various criticisms, including the charge that it is incompatible with relativity theory.
“Those who are unfamiliar with Griffin’s recent books will be grateful for this clear, readable, and thorough introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy as constructive (rather than deconstructive) and postmodern. However, those who are well versed in Griffin’s previous books will also benefit from his expanded use of the theory of hard-core common sense, his defense of theological ethics, and his detailed examination of Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle. In short, this is an excellent book that could be read with profit by philosophers and theologians generally.” — Daniel A. Dombrowski, author of Rawls and Religion: The Case for Political Liberalism
“No one working in the area of process thought will want to miss this major new book by David Ray Griffin.” — Donald W. Sherburne, coeditor of Whitehead’s Philosophy: Points of Connection.
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2007 - The mind-body problem, which Schopenhauer called the "world-knot" has been a central problem for philosophy since the time of Descartes. Among realists-those who accept the reality of the physical world-the two dominant approaches have been dualism and materialism, but there is a growing consensus that, if we are ever to understand how mind and body are related, a radically new approach is required. David Ray Griffin develops a third form of realism, one that resolves the basic problem (common to dualism and materialism) of the continued acceptance of the Cartesian view of matter. In dialogue with various philosophers, including Dennett, Kim, McGinn, Nagel, Seager, Searle, and Strawson, Griffin shows that materialist physicalism is even more problematic than dualism. He proposes instead a panexperientialist physicalism grounded in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Answering those who have rejected "panpsychism" as obviously absurd, Griffin argues compellingly that panexperientialism, by taking experience and spontaneity as fully natural, can finally provide a naturalistic account of the emergence of consciousness-an account that also does justice to the freedom we all suppose in practice.
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2014 - Can scientific naturalism, according to which there are no interruptions of the normal cause-effect relations, be compatible with divine activity, religious experience, and moral realism? Leading process philosopher of religion David Ray Griffin argues that panentheism provides the conceptual framework to overcome the perennial conflicts between these views, with important implications for religious pluralism, the problem of evil, and the academic study of religion. Panentheism—God as the soul of the world—explains how theism can be fully natural while still portraying God as distinct from and more than the world. Griffin’s Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism is an essential source for philosophers of religion and others seeking to reconcile faith with science and Christianity with other religions.
2016 - “God” has been the most embattled idea in the modern world. The lives of many people revolve around God; without God, they believe, life would be unbearable. Others regard the idea of God as the worst, most destructive, idea ever invented. The one group finds the evidence for God overwhelming; the other group finds the same for atheism. The debate has centered around the idea of God as the creator of the world. Many philosophers, theologians, and scientists have assumed that, if we would simply add up the good arguments for and against the existence of God, we could reach agreement, one way or the other. But in this book, David Ray Griffin argues that progress on this issue will be impossible unless we distinguish between two radically different ideas of a divine creator, which he calls “Gawd” and “God.” Whereas there is overwhelming evidence against the existence of Gawd, there is also overwhelming evidence for the reality of God. After looking at this evidence, the book illustrates the importance of this distinction for the issue of climate change.
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2016 - As the world increasingly grapples with the consequences of global warming and its resulting climate changes, the urgency of the crisis has become inescapable, despite continuing corporate-led efforts at fomenting doubt and denial. Then in June 2015 there occurred a powerful intervention into the discussion by Pope Francis. His encyclical, Laudato Si': On the Care for Our Common Home, called for swift action on climate change. Almost simultaneously with the official publication of this encyclical, there was the biggest-ever conference of the movement known as process thought, based primarily on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. This conference discussed various ways in which process thought could be helpful with respect to the global environmental crisis, especially climate change.
In this book, David Ray Griffin undertakes to show why process thought--meaning process philosophy, theology, and social/economic thought--provides a natural and helpful context in which to expound and defend the ecological message in the pope's encyclical. In concise arguments, Griffin shows that the position of Whitehead-based process thought on climate change and related matters is remarkably similar to that of Pope Francis in the encyclical. This similarity is important for two reasons. First, as process thought and the pope's encyclical come out of very different traditions, the similarity allows each to add credibility to the other. Second, process thought, which embodies a long-standing type of philosophical theology that is consistent with today's best science and has been growing in influence, can be used to support dimensions of the pope's encyclical that might be rejected by secular minds.
2017 - Why process theology? Why now? In these eight essays, David Ray Griffin not only illuminates key ideas of process theology but offers compelling arguments for their importance in addressing the urgent issues of our time. Available for the first time in one place, these essays are the summation of a life’s work, including Griffin’s carefully developed arguments for the rejection of supernaturalism and divine omnipotence, and in favor of religious pluralism, panentheism, and the “neo-classical” theism of Charles Hartshorne. Always relevant, Griffin draws a direct line from a society’s theology to its ideology, which in the U.S. includes the denial of climate change, the logic of war, and the loss of a moral center.
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2019 - In 1934, Confessing Christians in Germany declared that support for the Nazi regime violated the basic principles of the Christian faith, thereby creating a status confesionis (confessional situation), requiring a binding doctrinal stance on sociopolitical questions. In this book, the result of a lifetime of engaged religious, philosophical, and critical inquiry, David Ray Griffin declares that with regard to American Empire, the church in America is in a similarly dire situation and must stand up for the integrity of the Gospel. He writes: “Our Christian faith at its best would lead us, both as individual Christians and as churches, to oppose the American Empire in the name of God. As long as the church does not explicitly oppose this empire, it is, by its silence, a de facto supporter.”Chapter by chapter (in some cases, verse by verse) Griffin argues that Christians in America must deal with the darker side of their country, especially its imperialism, racism, and nuclear and climate policies. With clarity and insight, Griffin points out ways in which the American Empire is similar to the Roman Empire—the empire that crucified Jesus—and urges Christians, “publicly and unequivocally” to reject it.To that end, Griffin has written a theology that aims always to keep in mind the meaning of “gospel”—good news. That is, it focuses on the primary doctrines of Christian faith, which are unqualifiedly good news, as distinct from secondary and tertiary doctrines, some of which have delivered bad—sometimes horrible—news. The primary doctrines are rooted in the Bible, especially the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Written from the perspective of process theology, the book is “liberal in method and conservative in content.” “Liberal in method” means that all appeals to authority to establish truth are rejected. Theology, like philosophy, can argue for the truth of its doctrines only on the basis of evidence and reason. So although the reality of revelation can be affirmed, theologians cannot make claims for the truth of events or doctrines by claiming that this truth was revealed. It is “conservative in content” by virtue of employing a constructive postmodern worldview, based on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Being “conservative in content” does not mean affirming the types of conservative theology that allow secondary and tertiary doctrines to distort the gospel’s primary doctrines. It means reaffirming primary doctrines of the Christian gospel, such as God’s creation of the world, God as actively present in us, and divinely-given life after death. American Christianity is in crisis. In this timely book, David Ray Griffin preaches the Gospel—not interpreted for the convenience of Americans, but to remind Americans of what the Gospel actually says and what it calls us to do.
2021 - This position has lately been described as building ecological civilizations of equality and fairness at its humanitarian core. That by recognizing God's heart of compassion and building whole societies devoted to open and thriving democracies humanity does nest when serving each other's needs. - res
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Modern imperialism is primarily a Christian phenomenon. The British Empire and now the American Empire were created by countries regarding themselves as primarily Christian. But it has been the period since the second world war, when the US became especially dominant, that imperialism has come to be seen as a threat to the very existence of civilization. Throughout much of the 20th century, America’s most famous theologian was Reinhold Niebuhr. (His picture was once on the cover of Time magazine, and Barack Obama has said Niebuhr was his favorite theologian). For decades, Niebuhr brought a Christian perspective to the national discourse on issues of war, peace, international affairs, and global democracy. That his view changed dramatically over the course of his career—from first advocating for global democracy and then turning decisively against it—makes a study of his positions a useful background for renewed calls for a global democratic government. Our present world order allows for war, imperialism, and plutocracy, along with the increasingly dire consequences of climate chaos and pandemics. In this book, Griffin makes an impassioned case for the rejection of this world order and a commitment to the only livable alternative—a worldwide movement to democratize human civilization.