physics and biology, in which reality is understood as coherence,
Cosmic Becoming Cycle → poetic and metaphysical expansion
Embodied Process Realism → formal philosophical framework
Processual Divine Coherence → theological bridge
Most recently, in Section X of the Reality Series, we explored through five essays The Bible in History & Christianity’s Search for God, asking of the instability caused to religious traditions when introduced to the various manuscript traditions of the bible's construction. Specifically, to the canon formation of the New Testament, its textual reconstructions through the early centuries of the church into the early medieval period, and the uncovered variant reading's modernizing affects on the Christian faith when researching the church's varied histories.
And though the series presented a limited discussion on humanity’s long and unfinished conversation about God through the i) history of Israel, ii) Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection, and, iii) of the Church's evolving theology through the centuries; it was observed that this conversation has not ended - and never will. From ancient man to modern man, God is as much an enigma now as before. A figure often bourne-and-bound to society's endless predilections of divine being and sacred duty as perceived either harmfully or helpfully through the many chapters of religious conversation and demeanor.
Accordingly, when observing these histories it has led us to asking the question, "What is Reality?" by looking at creation, and thereby looking at ourselves, our capacities, our beliefs, and our communions with one another, as to God and creation itself.
And rather than subjectively pontificating theologically as to God's character, wants, needs, and desires - or mashing these observations together while ignoring historical and cultural contexts - we might instead reverse our questioning by beginning with the task of philosophy first, rather than theology.
And if constructed carefully, we might be able to create a foundational base upon which a theology might be holistically constructed - thus arriving to similar, but philosophically distinctive, theological observations importantly built upon a philosophical foundation that might challenge presently assumed beliefs and ethics in a constructive - as well as a contained-and-qualified - manner.
Thus, we began by questioning the kind of reality we live within through the first 36 essays of the series. From the kind of universe we see-and-feel around us via quantum physics, to its evolutionary character, to the study of ourselves (re Identity et al), and lastly, to the kind of biblical religion that has arisen before-and-after the Christ figure of Jesus through both the Hebrew and Christian bibles. And more specifically, of the Christian view of God, self, nature, and mankind. And when doing so several important observations were made....
That when reviewing the formation of the Christian bible and its resulting variety of beliefs, there were found to be discontinuities between it and the Jewish Hebrew bible. That whether from i) the past assumptions of the forming early church which laid its foundations across a large region of geographical cultures, or from ii) the present Christian assumptions spread across today's global church - the kind of bible which was taught orally, then later read by the masses - held multiple beliefs which synthesized into multiple baseline orthodox views across the Church as seen in the Western, Eastern (Greek, Russian, Serbian), Oriental (Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian), Euro-American or Latin Roman-Catholic and Protestant traditions.
Mainly, we noticed the early Christian faith's wide plurality across regional cultures that wrestled with conversations of God, self, mankind, and nature; and within this conversation how consolidations took place to create a geographical "orthodoxy" bourne by societies of influence over lesser societies of lesser influence, dependent upon the imperial powers of that region. And to these historical developments a new kind of pressure has risen which now asks the Church whether its argued orthodoxies remain relevant or not.
These newer, more recent, pressures have resulted from methodical archaeological studies across the ancient Near East (ANE), modern textual research, and evolving biblical and phenomenological scholarship whose resulting discoveries are questioning the church's earlier constructed assumptions and orthodox theologies. This has resulted in present day conversations asking of God, self, mankind, and nature, across the vast labyrinth of the sciences, literatures, and subjects of life. Conversations which might be more helpfully held if couched within a philosophic-theology approach as versus either strict religious or scientific pronouncements re belief or non-belief.
*It should be noted that in the context of religious studies, phenomenology refers to the study of religion from the perspective of human experience, consciousness, and awareness, independent of whether the underlying religious doctrines are actually "true." And when you place it alongside archaeology, textual research, and biblical scholarship, it adds a powerful psychological and philosophical dimension by shifting the question from "Did God actually reveal this truth?" to "How does the human brain/psyche construct the phenomenon of a 'divine revelation'?"
Hence, conflicts will arise on both sides of the conversation - between faith and science. For faiths based upon unchallenged, closed, even rigid assumptions, their certainty will be tested. Throughout the history of the church there has been, and continues to be, a segment of the Christian Church bearing authoritarian faith structures. Such religious hierarchies will become quite uncomfortable with the challenging information being uncovered, and will make choices within its organization whether to maintained a closed atmosphere - perhaps becoming defensive when doing so - or to open its faith to rediscovery and renewal.
Moreover, this same process is being endured within the sciences as well, which has floundered between inadequate, incomplete, or insufficient philosophies over the centuries questioning its own beliefs and assumptions. This development we have also demonstrated through the entirety of the reality series. Hence, whether we are looking at either religion or science they each are engaged in the endless search for who, what, why, and how, we are in never ending conversations. A conversation which we will now engage through the lens of processual grammars of being, instability, rupture, descent, continuity, transformation, and reconciliation.
For those of the Christian faith, it should be noted then that i) the resurrected history of the bible and the study of the cultural phenomenologies within its narratives will both challenge and dismantle the older beliefs and assumptions of the traditional Church while simultaneously ii) seek to preserve the possibility of divine or sacred meaning, participation, and hope, beyond the church's artificial closures of divine acts, participation, communion, fellowship, and even the future itself.
Consequently, we might rightly perceive that inaccurate assumptions by the traditional church will ultimately require a breakage from theological systems enacting ontologies increasingly at odds with the processual becoming observed within reality itself. But rather than leaving a vacuum, process philosophy and theology is quietly asking whether modern day rupture might transform towards healthier discussions of God, self, society, and nature. Discussions that might more heavily lean into divine love and caretake for one another and environment.
But to attempt an intellectual reconstruction alone would be insufficient. For eventually every embodied ontology encounters rupture personally, corporately, nationally, and globally. Thus, at some point the continuity of reality as assumed or perceived will fracture. It is a natural cycle of life. And when it does...
- certainty will collapse,
- identity will destabilize,
- inherited worlds will rupture,
- and being itself will be forced into unfamiliar terrain.
Which has been the faith-experience of this author personally through his thirties and forties until finally rupturing across a span of two dark years between 2009-2011. Albeit belatedly, but when reconciled, became an overdue and healthy turning point. And it is precisely this same rupturing threshold that the Jonah narratives will now enter in concluding our Ontology of Reality Series.
These concluding essays are therefore not merely biblical studies, nor theological commentaries, in any conventional sense. Rather, they function as narrative enactments of relational becoming where Jonah becomes less a story about prophetic obedience and more an ontological-existential exploration of personal dissettlement, interruption, rupture, descent, enclosure, displacement, transformation, and re-entry into becoming.
Here the whale or great fish becomes:
- enclosure,
- suspension,
- liminality,
- and the collapse of prior continuity.
The storm becomes:
- rupture within false stability.
The hated city of Nineveh becomes:
- the feared Other,
- the destabilization of tribal identity,
- and the expansion of relational consciousness.
And Jonah himself becomes:
- the self encountering the terrifying instability of becoming.
Importantly, the story of Jonah never resolves neatly.
He does not emerge as triumphant hero, a perfected saint, nor fully reconciled self. Instead, he remains partially resistant, existentially unsettled, and reluctantly transformed.
In this way the narrative feels profoundly modern, deeply processual, and extraordinarily compatible with Embodied Process Realism, open relational metaphysics, and the broader ontological themes developed throughout this series.
The Jonah essays therefore function as a threshold movement within the Reality & Cosmology Series itself.
The essay series uncomfortably stands simultaneously -
- at the conclusion of ontology (of this series),
- at the edge of metaphysics (that will commence after this series), and
- at the beginning of existential participation within relational becoming.
not where structure disappears,
but where structure becomes lived rupture.
And it is there - in interruption, descent, and transformation -
that renewal, revival, even resurrected becoming can begin again.
- language,
- memory,
- religion,
- family,
- culture,
- nation,
- and the quiet assumption that the world before them will remain sufficiently stable beneath their feet.
Initially, processual identity will appear less as a constructed process than as a settled inheritance. One belongs to a people, a history, a moral framework, a sacred story, and a recognizable, but interpretted, world. Reality appears coherent because continuity itself conceals its own instability.
So long as interruption remains distant, being feels anchored and anchoring.
The self moves through life assuming that tomorrow will sufficiently resemble yesterday; that meaning will remain intelligible; and that inherited structures will continue carrying existence forward with enough coherence to preserve both identity and assuming world.
Such stability rarely announces itself as illusion.
It simply feels normal.
And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than within religious consciousness.
For religion often emerges as humanity’s attempt to stabilize meaning against the anxieties of uncertainty, ill-health, ill-events, death, contingency, rupture, and change.
Sacred texts, doctrines, rituals, traditions, and moral systems become continuity structures through which communities seek coherence across generations.
Through these constructed continuity structures we seek to locate ourselves within an ordered cosmos capable of carrying memory, identity, and hope beyond the fragility of individual existence.
Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that continuity is never absolute.
- Not civilizations.
- Not institutions.
- Not identities.
- Not nations.
- Not economies.
- Not relationships.
- Not theologies.
- Not even scripture itself.
At times reality interrupts its own assumed stabilities.
And when it does, inherited worlds begin to fracture.
What once appeared permanent suddenly reveals itself as provisional. Structures that once we trusted as - immovable, unquestionable, unsurmountable, firmed and fixed - begin to tremble beneath the weight of historical change, existential disruption, suffering, displacement, political collapse, personal loss, or the slow erosion of certainty itself.
The continuity that once stabilized identity no longer carries the same unquestioned authority.
At such moments being itself encounters personal rupture.
Importantly, rupture rarely announces itself dramatically at first. More often it enters our lives gradually:
- as unease,
- dislocation,
- estrangement,
- contradiction,
- exhaustion,
- grief, or
- the growing inability to reconcile inherited certainties with lived reality.
The world remains outwardly recognizable while inward continuity quietly begins to fail.
This is particularly true within inherited religious experience.
For many believers, faith initially functions as a stabilizing continuity structure through which reality appears morally ordered, divinely governed, and existentially secure.
God inhabits recognizable spheres of belief and doctrines. Scripture speaks with fixed clarity. The moral world appears divinely bounded and intelligible. Meaning feels anchored within stable metaphysical arrangements inherited through tradition and reinforced by communal participation.
Yet eventually we begin to encounter realities that our inherited frameworks cannot fully contain.
It is here that breakage begins.
In our last series on the history of the bible the academic discipline of historical criticism has pervasively destabilized long-held traditional assumptions regarding sacred texts.
Moreover, recent centuries of scientific discovery has reframed humanity’s place within the cosmos.
Even present politicized religion has corrupted spiritual identity.
And with that, institutionalized faith structures have become corrupted, failed, and fractured, the public's moral trust in the church's inherited institutions.
And with every perceived disruption our own personal suffering may increase, interrupting the inherited theological explanations we have held through our early years of assumed clarity.
The continuity of structures we once relied upon can no longer stabilize our identity of being - nor function any longer with the same degree of certainty they had once possessed.
At such thresholds individuals often experience not merely theological doubt, but ontological dislocation.For when continuity collapses, identity itself begins to destabilize.
In my own faith experience I have lived through all these stages of self rupture - internally, externally, within family, church community, and with inherited political structures assumed to be winsome and fairly democratic.
And these all bore towards the identity of my own religious inheritance of church and witness. This resulted initially in theological questioning of my faith which gradually widened into existential, global rupture. Assumptions once inherited as stable conversations with life became increasingly difficult to reconcile with lived reality, historical inquiry, political religion, and the expanding awareness of a far more relational, evolutionary, and processual universe than earlier theological systems had allowed.
What emerged was not simple unbelief.
Nor was it triumphant deconstruction.
*Rather, it was the unsettling recognition that continuity itself could no longer remain fixed in the way it had previously been imagined.
It was personally destructive. Personally decohering. And personally dislocating.
And it demanded reconciliation - one that could not come without a fuller experience of a personal deconstruction.
And yet - even within this very personal, very internal, rupture - being continued within this very dark space.
But neither did I wish to escape from this upheaval. To prematurely end it.
It was a kind of destruction which required attention - until it no longer did.
Something within this rupture demanded attention. To flee too quickly from its abyss would have been to preserve parts of past, older, continuities no longer capable of bearing the weight of reality itself.
Nor longer able to expand in its old wineskin. It needed a newer container.
One that I was not familiar with. Nor had inherited. Nor had any experience with.
The disruption therefore required endurance.
And so I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And stayed...
Not wishing to leave until it was time to go.
A bit more completed. A bit more reconciled.
But into a world that I could live within again...
Feeling released. Hopeful. And willing to engage with it again.
This is precisely where the Jonah narrative becomes not only philosophically and existentially significant, but spiritually informed and relocating.
For Jonah does not begin within chaos.
He begins within continuity.
He possesses an identity, a vocation, a calling, a national inheritance, a specific theology, a moral certitude, and a recognizable world structured through inherited meaning.
His reality appears ordered. Stable. Even understandable.
He inhabits a seemingly coherent world whose boundaries are morally and spiritually intelligible. Israel is Israel. Nineveh is Nineveh. Enemy and covenant remain as distinct categories. Divine justice appears narratively predictable.
Jonah understands who he is, where he belongs, and how reality itself is supposed to function.
Until interruption arrives.
The divine call of God did not merely ask Jonah to travel geographically. It destabilizes the continuity structures through which his identity had previously cohered.
God's command to enter the evil city of Nineveh - the feared imperial Other - so that God might spare its destruction, becomes an ontological rupture threatening Jonah's inherited moral boundaries, theological certainty, tribal identity, and the continuity of his very self.
Jonah’s flight therefore becomes far more than disobedience.
It becomes resistance against destabilized being.
For what Jonah fears is not merely Nineveh.
He fears - and importantly resists - divine transformation.
... the terrifying possibility that reality itself may be more relational, open, and unstable than his inherited continuity structures had allowed him to believe or embrace.
It was a transformation that was too far, reached too deep, wanted too much.
Thus Jonah’s story begins precisely where many ontological journeys truly begin:
not in certainty,
but in the slow collapse of continuity beneath the weight of becoming itself.
II - When Continuity Begins to Tremble
It is resistance.
Before the storm, before the sea, before enclosure within darkness and suspension, there is almost always an attempt to preserve inherited continuity against the deep intrusion of transformation.
The self senses the instability pressing inward-and-outward upon its inherited structures and instinctively seeks escape before interruption can fully unfold its consequences.
This is precisely the movement now unfolding within Jonah.
The divine summons has already entered his continuity structures. Reality has already begun shifting beneath his inherited world. Yet Jonah does not move toward the rupture. He moves away from it.
Importantly, Jonah’s flight from God's divine awareness should not be reduced merely to the old rubric of disobedience.
Such readings flatten the existential depth of the narrative.
For Jonah’s resistance is not simply moral refusal. It is the ontological resistance against transformation itself. The divine command welling up within him threatens far more than prophetic inconvenience. It threatens the inherited continuity through which Jonah's world, identity, morality, and theology have cohered.
He flees not only geographically, but existentially.
He attempts to retreat from a future in which inherited certainty can no longer remain stable in the forms previously trusted. He attempts to preserve the familiar boundaries through which identity has remained intelligible. Like many who encounter rupture within relational becoming, Jonah initially interprets interruption not as opening, but as threat.
This is profoundly human.
For most beings resist transformation long before they consciously understand why. The self senses that once continuity begins collapsing, no guaranteed path exists for returning unchanged. Something may survive interruption, but it will not survive in precisely the same form.
And so continuity attempts self-preservation.
One retreats deeper into inherited systems, familiar identities, established moral boundaries, political loyalties, institutional structures, religious certainty, or narratives capable of shielding the self from destabilization. The familiar becomes refuge against the terrifying openness now emerging beneath reality itself.
Yet interruption rarely disappears simply because one refuses it.
Reality continues pressing inward.
The deeper tragedy within Jonah’s flight is therefore not merely avoidance of divine instruction. It is the attempt to preserve a closed continuity within an increasingly relational universe. Jonah wishes to maintain a moral world in which:
- an enemy remains an enemy,
- divine judgment remains fixed upon this enemy,
- divine covenant remains bounded to the righteous,
- and divine mercy remains tribally contained to his people.
But God's divine summons has already destabilized those assumptions.
For if Nineveh may also stand within the possibility of transformation, repentance, and mercy, then Jonah’s inherited continuity can no longer remain morally sealed against the Other.
And this possibility terrifies him.
Not because Jonah lacks morality, but because relational expansion threatens identities constructed upon exclusionary stability. Mercy itself becomes destabilizing once it extends beyond the boundaries continuity had previously permitted.
This is why Jonah’s flight carries such existential power within the narrative.
He attempts to outrun personal uplift, expanding awareness, and existential becoming.
He descends toward Tarshish (we think this is a port city on southern Spain's coast) not merely to escape from Assyria's terror capital of Nineveh geographically, but to escape all senses of transformation. He seeks distance from interruption before rupture can fully reorganize the continuity structures through which his being has remained anchored.
Yet paradoxically, the attempt to preserve continuity often accelerates rupture itself.
For resistance does not stop becoming.
It merely changes the terrain upon which becoming unfolds.
And so Jonah descends.
Down to Joppa.
Down into the ship.
Down beneath the deck.
Down toward sleep.
Already the biblical narrative begins spatially mirroring ontological collapse. The movement downward reflects not merely physical relocation, but the gradual destabilization of inherited continuity itself. Jonah descends away from relational openness and inward toward enclosure, avoidance, suspension, and retreat.
Yet reality has already begun moving.
The sea has not yet fully opened beneath him.
But the storm is coming.
Jonah’s descent toward Tarshish initially appears successful.
The ship sails.
His distance increases from Nineveh.
The familiar world of prophetic obligation begins fading behind him as sea and horizon widen into apparent escape.
And so his storm arrives.For a brief moment, flight appears possible.
But rupture rarely remains internal alone.
Eventually reality itself begins participating in the interruption already unfolding within being.
Importantly, the storm in Jonah should not be understood merely as supernatural punishment imposed externally upon disobedience. Such interpretations again flattens the deeper ontological and existential dimensions of the narrative. The storm functions more profoundly as the externalization of personal destabilized continuity.
What Jonah attempts to flee inwardly now manifests outwardly cosmologically.
Sea, wind, vessel, bodies, fear, and consciousness all become drawn into the disturbance initiated by interruption.
The narrative universe of reality begins to tremble. Then rage. Reality no longer cooperates with Jonah’s attempt to preserve inherited closure against the expanding openness now pressing upon him.
The sea becomes like an ancient consciousness carrying a profoundly symbolic weight. Unlike the stability of land, the sea represents instability, unpredictability, depth, chaos, danger, and forces beyond human control. To enter the sea was to move away from stable order and toward contingency itself.
Jonah therefore flees not merely across geography, but into ontological instability.
And now instability answers.
The storm tears against the fragile continuity structures sustaining the ship. Wind fractures orientation. The vessel groans beneath forces larger than human control. Experienced sailors panic before powers exceeding inherited competence. Cargo is thrown overboard as survival itself suddenly supersedes economic continuity and ordinary purpose.
Everything unnecessary begins falling away.
This is one of rupture’s first great disclosures.
When continuity destabilizes deeply enough, reality begins exposing which structures are essential and which are merely provisional. Under sufficient interruption, inherited arrangements lose their permanence. The self discovers how much of ordinary stability depended upon conditions never guaranteed to endure.
And still Jonah sleeps.
This detail is profoundly important.
For Jonah’s sleep is not peace.
It is withdrawal.
A retreat beneath consciousness itself.
While reality convulses above him, Jonah descends below deck into suspension, avoidance, and disengagement. He attempts to remain untouched by the rupture already unfolding through both his world and his self. It is as though consciousness itself temporarily refuses participation in the transformation now underway.
Yet rupture does not disappear through unconsciousness.
Reality continues breaking open overhead.
The captain’s words therefore become existentially revealing:
“What do you mean, sleeper? Arise…”
The interruption now reaches directly into Jonah’s enclosure.
Sleep can no longer preserve continuity.
Avoidance can no longer contain becoming.
The world above is collapsing into instability while Jonah remains suspended beneath it, trapped between the continuity he can no longer preserve and the transformation he cannot yet embrace.
Importantly, everyone aboard the ship now participates within the rupture. Sailors pray to different gods. Fear spreads collectively. Human certainty fragments before uncontrollable reality. Distinctions between insider and outsider, believer and foreigner, prophet and pagan begin destabilizing under the shared vulnerability of existential threat.
Already the narrative quietly begins dissolving Jonah’s inherited tribal ontology.
For rupture universalizes fragility.
Under sufficient destabilization, all beings encounter contingency together.
The storm therefore becomes more than weather.
It becomes revelation.
Reality itself now refuses closure.
V - The Casting of Lots and the Exposure of Being
Rupture eventually demands disclosure.
What had remained hidden beneath continuity cannot remain concealed indefinitely once destabilization deepens sufficiently. The storm now shaking sea, ship, and consciousness presses the narrative toward revelation itself. Something aboard the vessel no longer coheres with the continuity attempting to sustain it, and all aboard instinctively sense that the disturbance is no longer merely environmental.
Reality itself feels exposed.
The sailors therefore turn toward an ancient human instinct present across civilizations and histories: the search for meaning within disruption. They cast lots not merely to locate blame, but to identify the fracture hidden beneath visible catastrophe. In moments of rupture human beings often seek explanation with desperate urgency, believing suffering must somehow disclose its source if continuity is ever to be restored.
And the lot falls upon Jonah.
Importantly, this moment functions as far more than divine accusation. It becomes ontological unveiling. Jonah, who had attempted retreat, concealment, suspension, and avoidance, is now drawn unwillingly back into relational exposure. The self hidden beneath the deck is forced upward into visibility before others.
Rupture has a way of doing this.
What continuity allowed the self to conceal, interruption gradually uncovers.
Illusions maintained beneath stable conditions become increasingly difficult to preserve once reality itself destabilizes. One may flee inwardly, emotionally, spiritually, politically, or geographically, but eventually interruption reaches beneath concealment and demands encounter.
And so the questioning begins.
“Who are you?”“Where do you come from?”“What is your occupation?”“What people are you?”
These are not merely informational questions.
They are ontological questions.
For when continuity collapses, identity itself comes under interrogation. The inherited structures through which the self previously understood its place within reality no longer feel fully secure. Rupture forces being toward exposure. The self must now confront what remains when continuity can no longer silently stabilize identity from beneath.
Jonah’s response is revealing:
“I am a Hebrew…”
Notice how identity initially retreats toward inherited continuity structures. Jonah answers through nationality, religion, and inherited belonging. He reaches backward toward the continuity systems that had previously stabilized his world before interruption entered it. Even now, while reality convulses around him, the self instinctively seeks refuge within recognizable categories capable of preserving coherence against destabilization.
Yet the storm continues without abatement...
... and inherited continuity alone can no longer contain the rupture already unfolding.
And this is one of interruption’s deepest existential disclosures:
... identity inherited is not always identity transformed.
The self may continue speaking the language of former continuity long after reality itself has begun opening toward deeper becoming. One may preserve doctrinal vocabulary, inherited affiliations, political identities, institutional loyalties, or familiar metaphysical assumptions while internally sensing that continuity itself has already begun failing beneath them.
the self outwardly remains recognizable while inwardly becoming increasingly displaced from its prior coherence.
Jonah now inhabits precisely this condition.
He knows enough to recognize the interruption unfolding around him, yet not enough to embrace transformation willingly. He remains suspended between continuity and becoming, between inherited certainty and relational openness, between the world already destabilizing and the self still attempting to preserve its former arrangements.
And the sailors, paradoxically, begin appearing more existentially open than Jonah himself.
This irony is central to the narrative.
The supposed outsiders respond collectively, relationally, vulnerably, and honestly before uncontrollable reality, while Jonah - the prophetic insider - remains trapped within resistance against the transformation now overtaking his continuity structures. Already the narrative destabilizes rigid distinctions between insider and outsider, faithful and foreigner, covenant and stranger.
Rupture exposes everyone.
But not everyone responds identically to exposure.
Some become more open.
Others retreat further into self-preservation.
Jonah still clings to continuity even while recognizing its collapse.
Yet reality continues pressing toward disclosure.
For interruption, once fully underway, rarely permits one's being to remain hidden indefinitely.
I. Process Philosophy and Relational Ontology
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
———. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.
John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.
David Ray Griffin. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Catherine Keller. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.
II. Phenomenology and Existential Becoming
Edmund Husserl. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983.
Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
Søren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety. Translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Paul Tillich. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952.
III. Biblical Studies and the Jonah Tradition
Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
Phyllis Trible. Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.
Jack M. Sasson. Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. National Council of Churches, 2021.
IV. Consciousness, Meaning, and Modernity
Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Iain McGilchrist. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspectiva Press, 2021.
Rudolf Otto. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.
