Quotes & Sayings


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Showing posts with label Process & Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Process & Poetry. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

R.E. Slater - A Country Idyll (prose)



A Country Idyll
(prose)

by R.E. Slater


Today is one of those really cold wintry days in Michigan where time is a given and outdoor adventures are kept to a minimum unless you have the proper warm flannelled clothes, heavy coat, thick boots, hat, and scarf, and the personal ability to endure the cold and actually enjoy it.

Myself, though I am growing old, I still love winter, its wonder, solitude, silence, and ferocity. The worse it gets the more I love it. In childhood if there was a raging blizzard blowing and drifting outside I and my brother were in the "teeth of it" as we sledded down our tall hills to then scramble up them, then down, again-and-again until we tired.

And when not sliding we were testing our "daring do" abilities by jumping into deep snowdrifts nineteen feet down trying to hit bottom (we never did) to see if we could scale back up them or fight our way out of their massif miens. But do not worry, those hillside drifts were skinny, more tall than wide. Four feet at best, sometimes more.

Across our hills lay the old 150-year-old barn where the winds would gather to crest the frozen fence lines and blow across the hill tops ringing the wetland below. There, on the hills or up at the barn we could expect 25 to 30 feet of snowdrift four to six foot deep blown lengthwise and down the contour of the hills. When younger we built very long luge runs bored like tunnels through the bottoms of the drifts. And within their interiors we built one and two-person snow rooms from early morning until late at night when the bunny rabbits hopped about, and we could watch them like gophers from our dens. Later, when older, we learned how to "bust through their tops" with a snowmobile gunning the engine straight up the big hills, then slamming the drift front-on, trying to carry 30 or so feet of air before landing on the downward side of the sloped hill.

We had a lot of fun during the winters. Dad would plow the drives and stack large snow piles by the dilapidated chicken coop or barn and as the plowed snow grew higher and higher in height and girth we waited and waited until pulling out the iron shovel-spades from nearby garage, began carving out our own majestic snow castle; or play king-on-the-hill like we did at school, to be pushed down rolling all the way to the bottom of the massive snow pile.

And on icy days when not using our Radio Flyer metal-runner sleds on the hills, we would glide across the flat icy fields steering around tufted island of wild grasses where the snow gave in and stopped our fun. Sometimes we ran a hundred feet and sometimes we never stopped until we reached the icicled fence lines. It was a lot of fun.


And then there were the holidays of Christmas and forced winter school closures where we waxed luxuriant to play board games through the morning till bored then bundled up to visit our grand old grandma next door bereft of granddad back when we were too young to understand.

She would watch us slide down her chimney's "coal shute" built into the house as an anchorage to the outer chimney; or make labyrinthine mazes with our booted feet, scooting across the crusty snow working around-and-around or, in-and-out, then play catch-me-tag as we scampered about the maze trying to catch one another.

When cold, we would fly into the old farmhouse's back "work room" or "ready room" where dad, his brothers and sisters, and my uncles and aunts five generations back, would gather to dress for the fields and dairy barns; or undress and clean up after a long day of farming and husbandry.

Most days, we flew in to warm up our little bodies. Which delighted grandma no end. We would peel off our wet outer clothes and iced-up buckle boots to be lured within to Graham Crackers and milk as we explored again the old house with its framed pictures and family rooms.

And on special days when coming indoors we might find grandma working about two very large, vat-like, and rounded laundry tubs filled with steaming hot water rising about her fragile frame and filling the ready-room with much need heat. There we would watch with child-like eyes grandma move about the tubs stirring the wet clothes in the hot waters or winding them through a sturdy pre-1930s hand wringer before clothes pinning all to a strung line about the clapboard room.

She always gave a wry, toothy smile from her diminutive figure clad in thin gingham dress before measuring ourselves to her frame shoulder to shoulder to see if we might be as tall as she! By age ten we had caught up with our beloved "second mom" before scampering down the cement floor hall to a back anteroom where an inside - and importantly, an unfrozen hand pump served up the best of coldest waters in a speckled blue enameled tin cup.

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it...


And if our busy dad wasn't on the roads policing or, up at the fire barns cleaning up the ash soot of the fire equipment and trucks after a fire, or driving our school bus morning and afternoon, we might find him up at cold barn in the dark of night servicing the plow tractor so it would be ready for use. He would add oil, gas, grease, check the tire chains, and always place a trickle charger on the battery to keep it in good health on cold nights.

Looking around the night-filled blackened barn lay hundred-year whatnot and older, inexplicable, paraphernalia. The kind of stuff you see in Midwest antique stores. To us, it was junk, much used, and never removed by the hands that had placed it there years and years and years ago. There it lay with thick dust upon it underneath a mouldy atmosphere of age.

While dad worked, we would climb up a rickety wooden rung ladder nailed into the beams which rose above the iron implements of plow, disk or tractor, thirty feet into the air, then fling upon a heavy 3' X 3'-foot double planked door to gain entry into the loft. Within, what once held hay now held more disused antiques. On summer days the space was filled with floating/wafting dust motes... but in the black, only the shafts of light from the dim bulb below gained entry through the upper planked floor.

One especially good memory I have is that on the worst of the winter storms or summer gales, I would brave the elements to gain the barn, squeeze through between the jammed tractor doors, and sit in the loft above listening to the old barn groan and moan telling me of its hoary memories as I might imagine them from the dissolute litter lying about me.


In my mid-twenties I sadly tore down the old wood barn. We were selling all our homesteaded acreage as all my relatives were dying or too old to keep the farm with their day jobs. We had already sold the old sixty-foot Quonset steel barn which held the dairy herd below under heavy planked floor. It had been disassembled and rebuilt north of us on an active pig farm. Forty years later I was blessed to walk within its structure at the consent of the owner who had torn it down, and with my cousin and wife, we fell silent and simply listened to the movement of the old iron beams swaying and creaking for a while. It was the finest of symphonies to our humble hearts and ears.

As I took down my heritage, I first removed the attached-and-slated corn crib then proceeded to remove the ancient, boarded siding and overlapping ribs. Dad wanted all the old nails removed and bucketed, which took some time. Once stripped of naked of cladding I next tried to undowel the 6/8" wooden tendon pins and the massive 14/16" beam pins to no avail. Worse, I could see all the work down 150 years ago by my ancestor who had hand-adzed each beam across the length of all four of its sides. This was truly a labor I did not like nor one I had wished to do.

Watching, my dad and his brother (my uncle) suggested pulling down the structure with the old tractor. It was an old, rusted Farmall M that had been well cared for and never spent one night outside in the rain or snow. We strapped a length of chains to the back frame of the tractor then commenced tugging-and-pulling 8 of the 12 main upright beams holding everything up: Imagine walking alongside a broken, tottering structure to attach chains to several corner and side beams... we left the interior beams alone of course.

One by one we broke the bottoms of the grand, noble, upright beams, until the whole skeleton finally gave in along with the falling tinned plated roof. In our moment of glory, we each found a deep sadness which comes from living too long. I have grieved for years over the loss of our pioneered land, our farm buildings, my grandparents, and the many overwhelming memories of family and friends working the fields and gardens together, picnicking, hunting, or playing baseball on the hay fields.

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it...


To grant homage to the pre-industrial, agrarian pioneering days of yesteryear, I was listening one winter day in early December to my schoolteacher read to me in second of third grade the wintry idyll, Snowbound, by John Greenleaf Whittier. As I sat at my old fold-top desk listening to the verse's tones and lights I felt a deep, inner affinity for the words and imagery being read.

Here, as my own generations had done for many years, in this simple one-room school built 150 years ago by my ancestors; where I walked every morning and mid-afternoon across the hay and grain fields, and dairy pastures; climbing up-and-over the boxed-wired rotting fence posts and lines; or drawing through the barbed-wired and rusted post fence lines; grudgingly wading through wet morning dews of field clover with my lunchbox in one hand and books in the other; where my pants, thin socks, and worn shoes took all morning to dry; here, I fell in love with a well-scripted verse by a poet I never knew. And though I have tried my own hand at this written art I realize it is only for the gifted few who have the muse and verve within the souls which might spill their words across the gilded page welling-up deeply held, visceral feelings we thought had long died within us long ago.

So, here, at the start of January's dark wintry days and blacker, moonless nights, is a poem you may, or may not like. But at the poetry site I am directing you too, you may find other poems to explore, read, muse, or share.

To all wintry travellers seeking a warm fire to sit by,
and a soft light to read by in socked feet and flannel shirt,
of versed dreams remembering yesteryear's youth,
or loss loves and refound fortitudes...
enjoy these seldom moments of distant memory
dulled by the intervening years of a lived life....

- re slater


R.E. Slater
January 16, 2024


John Greenleaf Whittier - Snowbound, A Winter Idyl



Tuesday, March 14, 2023

210 Sacred Poems - Compiled by Jay McDaniel


Photo by Jorge Salvador on Unsplash


210 Sacred Poems

by Jay McDaniel
December 2020

"Reading sacred poetry is a time-honored spiritual practice. If you'd like to incorporate it into your devotions, we have many resources at Spirituality & Practice for you."

​Thus write Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in the world's most inclusive interfaith resource center, the website Spirituality and Practice. Every April for the last seven years, during National Poetry Month in the United States, they have offered thirty poems for interfaith readers. I have compiled the poems into one list of 210 poems, with links to their site for each poem. Enjoy.

  1. The Sun Never Says by Hafiz
  2. One Song by Rumi
  3. Metamorphosis by May Sarton
  4. Attachment by Vasant Lad
  5. Questions by Ghalib
  6. Ryokan and Mary Lou Kownacki
  7. Hum by Mary Oliver
  8. All That Is Joy by Rabindranath Tagore
  9. My Joy by Rabi'a
  10. Haiku by Buson and Issa
  11. Ecstatic Poems by Kabir
  12. Beauty and Ugliness by Lao Tzu
  13. Waging Peace by Sarah Klassan
  14. The Same Inside by Anna Swir
  15. Tears by Svein Myreng
  16. That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins
  17. There Is No Road by Antonio Machado
  18. Don't Make Lists by Dorothy Walters
  19. Aware by Denise Levertov
  20. 1979 by Wendell Berry
  21. I Like You by Kevin Anderson
  22. Roll Call by William Stafford
  23. Stone by Charles Simic
  24. For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield
  25. Love after Love by Derek Walcott
  26. Healing by Joseph Bruchac
  27. Ars Poetica by Blaga Dimitrova
  28. Earth Verse by Gary Snyder
  29. The Good News by Thich Nhat Hanh
  30. Hold on to April by Jesse Stuart
  31. Trees Can Be Our Teachers by Satish Kumar
  32. Live With the Spirit by Jessica Powers
  33. Sixty-Four by Daniel Skatch-Mills
  34. Open the Window by Rumi
  35. Fern-Leafed Beech by Moyra Caldecott
  36. Wild Things by Wendell Berry
  37. Three Poems on Presence by Baisao
  38. Miracles by Daniel Berrigan
  39. Butterflies by Siegfried Sassoon
  40. Living by Denise Levertov
  41. Goodnight by Carl Sandberg
  42. Two Prayers on Grace by James Vanden Bosch
  43. What Is the Greatest Gift? by Mary Oliver
  44. Three Poems on Hope
  45. Not Enemies by Stephen Levine
  46. Olive Trees by Marilyn Chandler McEntyr
  47. Split the Sack by Rumi
  48. The Earth Is Waiting For You by Thich Nhat Hanh
  49. Surviving Has Made Me Crazy by Mark Nepo
  50. On Forgiveness by Karyn Kedar
  51. Morning Has Broken by Eleanor Farjeon
  52. Rendition of Psalm 41 by Nan Merrill
  53. Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton
  54. Love Poems by Susan Landon, Ann Reisfeld Boutte, and Susan R. Norton
  55. First Night by Julia Ackerman
  56. An Atom of Love by Yunus Emre
  57. Dear Diary by Leonard Cohen
  58. Freedom to Marry by Barbara Hamilton-Holway
  59. Four Sufi Poems
  60. Icon by Mary Rose O'Reilley
  61. Ecstasy by Hayden Carruth
  62. Love Sonnet by Pablo Neruda
  63. The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
  64. Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
  65. The Answering Machine by Linda Pastan
  66. Soil by Richard H. Goodman
  67. Zero Circle by Rumi
  68. The True Nature of Your Beloved by Hafiz
  69. Sweet Darkness by David Whyte
  70. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
  71. A poem by Mirabai
  72. A poem by Lalla
  73. A poem by St. Catherine of Siena
  74. A poem by Meister Eckhart
  75. Against Certainty by Jane Hirshfield
  76. Serenity Is Not by Katherine Swarts
  77. Oneness by Thich Nhat Hanh
  78. A poem by William Stafford
  79. A poem by Mary de La Valette
  80. A Place to Sit by Kabir
  81. Living in Hope by Suzanne C. Cole
  82. A poem by Jim Cohn
  83. Who Knows What Is Going On? by Juan Ramon Jimenez
  84. The Guardian Angel by Rolf Jacobsen
  85. It Is That Dream by Olav H. Haug
  86. Questions by Peter Dixon
  87. Have You Not Heard His Silent Steps? by Rabindranath Tagore
  88. God's Name by Tukaram
  89. Sometimes by Hermann Hesse
  90. There You Are by Rumi
  91. Earth, Sister Earth by Dom Helder Camara
  92. The Way They Held Each Other by Mira
  93. A Cushion for Your Head by Hafiz
  94. Annunciation by Marie Howe
  95. Just Stop by Baba Afdal Kashani
  96. That Passeth All Understanding by Denise Levertov
  97. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
  98. After the Sea by John O'Donohue
  99. The First Book by Rabindranath Tagore
  100. The Clay Jug by Kabir
  101. White Apples by Donald Hall
  102. In the World by Brigid Lowry
  103. A poem on Love by Kabir
  104. Remember by Joy Harjo
  105. Nothing Much by Allison Harris
  106. A poem on silence by Baisao
  107. Peonies at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
  108. Reasons to Meditate by Lisa Cullen
  109. The First Book by Rita Dove
  110. A poem on abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
  111. Soil by Richard H. Goodwin
  112. Seeking Your Trace by Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
  113. Vision by May Thielgaard Watts
  114. A poem on devotion by Mary Lou Kownacki
  115. A poem on kindness by Margaret Jain
  116. A poem on transformation by Hugh Robert Orr
  117. What Does Light Talk About? by St. Thomas Aquinas
  118. Love Is by May Swenson
  119. Leisure by W. D. Davies
  120. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
  121. The Old Elm Tree by the River by Wendell Berry
  122. Love at First Sight by Wislawa Szymborska
  123. Never Lose the Way by Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
  124. Living the Scriptures by Lalla of India
  125. So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye
  126. There Is a Wonderful Game by Hafiz
  127. Poetry by Pablo Neruda
  128. On Ordinary Daily Affairs by Layman P'ang
  129. A Kiss by Deborah Garrison
  130. Is My Soul Asleep? by Antonio Machado
  131. On Mother Earth by Jamie Sams
  132. When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield
  133. Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
  134. Ask Me by William Stafford
  135. Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon
  136. A poem - prayer about love and life by Kuan Tao-sheng
  137. A poem-prayer for solidarity and justice by Arthur Waskow
  138. Growing older with beauty by Robert Terry Weston
  139. A Lover Who Wants His Lovers Near by Rabia
  140. God Would Kneel Down by St. Francis of Assisi
  141. How Then Can We Argue? by Meister Eckhart
  142. Each Soul Completes Me by Hafiz
  143. This Place of Abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
  144. First He Looked Confused by Tukaram
  145. Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
  146. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
  147. If You Have Nothing by Jessica Powers
  148. Paper Cranes by Thomas Merton
  149. God Paints the Rainbows by Barb Laski
  150. A poem about wisdom by Makeda, Queen of Sheba
  151. In a Holy Book I Have by Hafiz
  152. Little Things by Sharon Olds
  153. Joy by Robert Morneau
  154. The Road to God by Melannie Svoboda
  155. A poem by Henry Van Dyke
  156. Chilean Creed by James Conlon
  157. A poem by Edward Searl
  158. A poem by Judith Billings
  159. The Inner History of a Day by John O'Donohue
  160. A Marriage, an Elegy by Wendell Berry
  161. The Book of Endings by Sam Taylor
  162. A poem by Hildegard of Bingen
  163. Marriage by Susan R. Norton
  164. A poem by St. John of the Cross
  165. A poem by J. David Scheyer
  166. My Life by Billy Collins
  167. The Foot-Washing by A. R. Ammons
  168. Simon the Cyrenian Speaks by Countee Cullen
  169. Early Lynching by Carl Sandburg
  170. Easter Night by Alice Meynell
  171. Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno
  172. The Madness of Love by Hadewijch of Antwerp
  173. Human Wisdom by Charles Peguy
  174. The Gift by Zoraida Rivera Morales
  175. A poem by Ly Ngoc Keiu
  176. Passing Through by Stanley Kunitz
  177. From Recovery by Rabindranath Tagore
  178. A poem by Novalis
  179. Diving by A E I Falconer
  180. Was it Light? by Theodore Roethke
  181. The Journey of the Mind by Anya Dunaif
  182. Looking West by Sofiy Inck
  183. What Is a Hero? by Nimai Agarwal
  184. The Word by Swastika Jajoo
  185. After I Die by Niti Majethia
  186. True… Or Not? By Swastika Jajoo
  187. I See The Night by Maya Mesh
  188. Sowing Hope by Tammata Murthy
  189. Ever Deeper: A Poem for My Grandfather by Will Hodgkinson
  190. Blue by Victoria Krylova
  191. Pure Love by Gertie-Pearl Zwick-Schachter
  192. When the Universe Sings Goodnight by Niti Majethia
  193. Plastic Tractors by Will Hodgkinson
  194. Perfume Bottles by Fareeha Shah
  195. Rift into Childhood by Gracie Griffin
  196. When the Sun by Charlotte Rauner
  197. The Playground in Winter by Maria Christian
  198. The Soul of Nature by Niti Majethia
  199. Not Yet by Caie Kelley
  200. Artemis by Alice Simmons
  201. The Divine Vision by Tanmaya Murthy
  202. Backyard Woods by Isabel Bautista
  203. The Pear Tree by Caroline Harris
  204. I always feel like myself by Pie Rasor
  205. Volunteer by Rafik Maharja
  206. With a Pencil in My Hand by Gracie Griffin
  207. The Sunset of My Life by Meenu ravi
  208. The Watching One by Lucia O'Corozine
  209. Selected Poems from Around the World by Mary Ernesi, Tanika Stewart, and Odelia
  210. Snowflakes Carry My Worries Away by Katie Champlin




Why Read?

In the clatter and clamor of our lives, we need ways to connect deeply with our souls. Whenever we feel depleted, our favorite poets invariably refresh and refuel us. The quality of their attention, the way they notice things we easily overlook, summons the joy and wonder within us. Their songs of both praise and lament speak the words it is sometimes hard for us to articulate. They put us in the presence of the ineffable and the holy. We drop our jaws and swallow our pride...Businessman James Autry captures another attraction of poetry — it "gives you permission to feel." The best poets tap into our deepest yearnings.

- Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat, Spirituality and Practice


What makes a poem sacred?

A poem is sacred if, after reading it or listening to it, you are just a little wiser and kinder, more creative and playful, more attuned to beauty and shocked by injustice, than you would have been otherwise. The poem makes a difference in how you think and live.

The poem need not be religious in order to be sacred. It does not have to be about God or heavenly ecstasy, or use words like holy and sacred and spiritual. Yes, it can have such themes. It can be obviously religious. But it can also be about ordinary life, about cars and dogs and sidewalks, about whole or broken relationships, about sadness and beauty and moonlight, about planets and tulips and cat's eyes.

Sacredness is a relationship between you and the poem. It lies in how you read the poem and in the fruits of your reading. Here are some of the best fruits of sacred reading, borrowed from Spirituality and Practice.


These fruits are practical and ordinary. The sacred becomes fully sacred only when its values are expressed in daily life: at home and in the workplace, among neighbors and strangers, in the parking lot and the schoolyard, in the voting booth and community center. The purpose of sacred poetry is to help you live wisely and compassionately, with love and vitality, in the world beyond poetry. As it achieves its purpose, it simultaneously refreshes and refuels your soul. It gives you permission to feel.

- Jay McDaniel, December 2020



Reading Fragments of Poems
​as a Spiritual Practice

Recently some friends of mine started an online poetry journal called Heron Tree. It offers you one poem a week - absolutely free.

As I write this, the poem for the week is Onion Pie by Joey Nicolletti. It begins like this:

The wind, the rattling wall, dinner
baking in the oven, the dead of winter
a string of salt diamonds
alight in a street of slush and starlit ice,
and the cat retires
to his feathery bed.

It is wintertime. I picture my own cat named Zooey, retiring to her own feathery bed. I think of how delicious it would be to have some onion pie. I picture the street outside, which had not long ago been salted with crystals. I remember the diamonds.

I may not read any further. I know that Joey Nicolletti hopes I will. After all, he wrote the poem as an organic whole, with each part related to the other parts. In her now classic The Life of Poetry (1949) Muriel Rukeyser speaks of poems as organic wholes full of movement, which grow like trees. She is famous for saying that the universe is like stories, not atoms. For her a poem is a story, too.

But sometimes I think it's fine just to nibble at a poem, taking a line or series of lines that somehow nourish the imagination and not even completing it. If it's worth reading at all, it's worth reading halfway.

The western religious traditions have a tradition called lectio divina or sacred reading. When you read in a sacred way, you are not looking for rules to live by or ideas to master. You are looking for nourishment of the soul. You take in images from scripture, however fragmentary, and simply rest in them trusting that somehow, in the very resting, some divine nourishment is received. You let the images wash over you and inside you, in a kind of baptism of the imagination.

I need these baptisms. I need one poem a week. I need some onion pie to sink my imagination into, taking a break from the compulsively busy lifestyle into which I so often fall. Buddhists tell us that paying attention to the world around us and the worlds within us in a mindful way is the heart of spirituality. Poetry can help - even if you nibble.

Nibbling

I choose the word nibbling with care. Reading poetry is a physical activity even as it is a spiritual activity. Even if we read silently, we hear our own voice reading inside our heads. We pause at the end of lines and between stanzas, not unlike the way in which we pause when we take a breath. Sometimes we quietly move our lips, too, in a subtle and unconscious way. And sometimes we read out loud. Some people draw sharp distinctions between reading out loud and reading silently. Not me.

As we read we bring our bodies with us. We are sitting or walking, standing or lying down. We are looking with our eyes. The founder of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, says that all of our experiences begin with what he calls the withness of the body. Our bodies are not simply means by which we take our minds from one location to another; they are where the world meets us, including the world of poetry. As we read a poem our minds may be lost in a faraway land, but our bodies are here, with us, in the reading.

Imaginative Nibbling

Of course our imaginations are in the reading, too. Our imaginations enable us to move from one portion of the text to another, not unlike the way in which we might eat fruit salad. When you have a bowl of fruit salad in front of you, you choose the particular fruit -- bananas, strawberries, pineapple-- that strikes your fancy.

I think we can read poems like this, too. By this I mean two things. We do not need to read the whole poem if we are nourished by a part. We can stay with that part, and call it a night.

And even if we do read the whole poem, there is no need to read it in a linear fashion. We can jump from one section to another and then go back, not unlike the way in which we jump from one poem to another in an anthology, flipping back and forth. Call it non-linear nibbling.

Many contemporary poems are conducive to imaginative nibbling. They are a collage of lines which can be strung together in a linear order, forming an organic whole; but they can also be enjoyed in a non-linear way as a collage of fragments which can be seen as a whole but also have independent integrity.

Many sacred scriptures have this quality. Consider the Holy Qur'an. It is a collage of many different poems, and poems within poems, and poems within poems within poems. It is not a rule book, it is a cluster of warnings and invitations, helping us awaken to the unity -- the tawhid - within which we live and move and have our being. Some suras are warnings and some are invitations, but all are inviting us to experience awe and wonder.

Many poems are like mini-Qur'ans. This means that as you read them you can move from beginning to end; but you can also move from middle to beginning or from end to middle. And you can just stay on one or two lines if you are so inclined. You can begin in the middle, where all beginnings begin.

Beginning in the Middle

Think of how people read the Bible. There is no commandment in the Bible which says: "Thou shalt never begin in the middle." Jews and Christians begin in the middle all the time, turning to this book and that book within the good book. And for process thinkers, influenced by Whitehead, there may even be some divine sanction in it. According to process theology, the universe is without beginning or end. God does not create out of nothing but rather out of the pre-existing chaos at hand. This means that even the Holy One began in the middle when he or she began creating our universe. The chaos already existed. The Holy was just giving it a little order. If God can begin in the middle, we can, too. Let the winds of the spirit blow where they will.

For my part, when I begin in the middle, I always look for sentences that do not begin with "The." There is far too much declaration in the world today. Too many attempts to tidy things up, when there's so much beauty in the untidy. Too many ideologies of heart and mind. Buddhists teach us that there is a lot of spirituality in not having fixed views.

Kissed by Steam

There is a Zen rock garden in Kyoto that's designed so that, wherever you stand, you cannot see the whole. You see sand and the rocks, but no possibility for a controlling overview. All good poems are like this. Even if they come across as organic wholes, there's no final interpretation. Freedom from finality of statement is one of poetry's greatest gifts to humanity.

This is why it can be important -- even spiritually enlightened -- to focus on fragments. You are reminding yourself that even if you read the poem as a whole, this whole is nested in a larger whole -- the forever fluid rock garden of the universe -- which is never fully encompassed by any finite observer. Heidegger reminds us that we are always already inside this whole, and that we can never stand outside it and pretend that we are mere spectators.

When a simple line or phrase in the middle of a poem becomes the subject of your attention, you are aware of an immediate textual background that you don't know and comprehend. You are deciding not to know this background, at least for the moment.

This deciding not to know the whole is an act of faith. It is faith that there can be meaning in the particular which transcends the meaning of the whole, even as there is meaning in the whole which transcends the meaning of the particular. Here are the last two lines of Joey Nicolletti's poem:

my wife pulls the Onion Pie
out of the oven, kissed by steam.

Blake reminds us to see heaven in a wildflower and the universe in a grain of sand.

Onion Pie reminds us that there's more than a little divine steam when you take an onion pie out of the oven on a cold, cold day.

Maybe that is one of the purposes of poetry at its best. Maybe it helps us become kissed by the steam.

​- Jay McDaniel, December 2020


Photo by Ricardo Espejo Catalán on Unsplash


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.