Three Shorts: How to Think About the Bible, Civil Democracy, and Our Social Contracts with One Another

How to Think About the Bible

By R.E. Slater

When the Christian faith makes the following paradigm shift, it will make so much more sense than it does now. We will no longer have to defend the many indefensible things found in the Bible. As the great German theologian Karl Barth explained, the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men. It contains the word, it mediates the word.

Or as Peter Enns aptly explains, the Bible is where God allows his children to tell his story, however imperfectly they tell it.

The 16th century Protestant Reformer John Calvin called the Bible ‘the lisping of God.’ It’s God speaking with a speech impediment.

God knew what he was doing to ‘give’ an imperfect book to the church. It has been worshipped as an idol far too often and has become a replacement for God’s own authority at times in the history of the church rather than that which leads us to God and his love.

R.E. Slater

October 13, 2024

On Civil Democracy & Our Social

Contract with One Another

As you will find in the last two posted Facebook articles describing Leonard Leo's influence against America's importantly liberal, and generally revered, founding documents, "The Bill of Rights," "The Declaration of Independence," and "The United States Constitution." That these indignants live among us acting as ruthless oppressors to our nation's founding principles.

Such civil organizations use democracy to suppress democracy; they are complexly operating sources of conservative religious supremacists drawn lately again from Maga-Protestantism and sectarian-Catholicism working to withdraw our national identity we have inherited from our founding fathers to protect and expand their founding documents envisioning a new, less democratic humanity.

I cannot imagine a personal nor social identity uprooted from such vitally necessary human expressions of the human cause. What I can imagine is unchaining my corporate soul from all dehumanizing religious and sectarian groups. That I can, and must now, imagine leaving highly prejudicial and personally dehumanizing forces advocating against the sacred trust we bear for one another. That we are to guard each other from illicit forces seeking to deny our necessary and needful social contracts to one another as an evolving social species dedicated to life, liberty, and justice to the common man.

Who must uncommonly rise up against all dark forces inhabiting our souls, churches, and social/civil contracts by re-committing ourselves to the founding elements held within all cultures and races against the genocidal forces of brother against brother, and man against man.

That we hold within us a superior nobility driven by a greater force we may describe as a "God of love" who is committed against far darker and dread forces belittling our souls as worthless progenies bourned upon a divinely good and loving God who is the Primal Cause ruling over all succeeding secondary causes of death, cruelty, injustness, and oppression.

The great authors to humanity's dignity, worthiness and generators of light and love, have attested to the truths of the human soul and not to its negation.

This then is my primal identity, my purpose, and my aspiration. Committing to nothing less worthy when resisting the ruthless soul forces of indignity, corruption, injustice, and oppression.

R.E. Slater

October 13, 2024

My Journey into Processual Theology

(or, An Evolving Processual Sociology)

The Great Horizon is far enough to seem impossible

yet near enough to fire the imagination.

John Cobb has greatly influenced the direction of Whiteheadian process thought in the sancto-spheres of complexly organized moral, social, civil, scientific, ecological, and religious institutional behaviours held in their jointly organic reconstruction and awakening process activities when renewing processual traditions of human civilization.

Myself, having retiring in my early fifties I thought I might live out a retired life of travel, group ministry, and community involvement. And, in a way I did. But in another way I almost immediately began a deeply psychic reawakening of my spirit towards grander visions unrealized within my older, inherited self.

After nearly a full year of sacramental wilderness journey I found my former self deeply etched and scribed within when applying the worn motto of "learning to live in the realms of doubt and uncertainty." By it's sole force it opened up a new reality to me. A new living-ness. An enlivening-and-becoming reality to which I could apply processual being-ness towards a processual becoming-ness.

Almost immediately I took a heavy interest in what the great literatures and philosophical traditions could teach a society when committed to one another's resurrecting fellowship by applying the processual rubric of ecological civilization with it's vast array of interdependent social-relational interactions within itself and outside itself - described at once as an earthly-and-cosmological soul of present attenuative being/becoming-ness.

How we must enliven nature-around-us by acutely listening to its hoary eons of evolving sociality as it becomes in momentary processual formation truer to its divinely birthed nature and guiding (Holy) Spirit imbuing body and soul.

Hence, the need to address how static classic theism must be absorbed into a living processual theism which at once, as Primal Cause, breathed a processual DNA into the eco-cosmic soul of psychically alive processes requiring a processual cosmo-metaphysic, ontology and enlivening ethos.

I then began a writing campaign using non-processual and process-based poetry and processually alive Christian thought to inform, educate and reconstruct what processual societies in relational, experiential, and religio-cultural formation to one another might look like.

Seventeen years later I have actively published the need for humanity to reconstruct within itself an open, organically alive, beneficial systems of thought and living in social evolutionary context to have been the better path taken. A path that required the publication of my processual journey from then to now in hopes that fellow process travellers might be enriched to inspire humanity towards renewing beneficial fellowships incorporating open, processual and fluid symbolic language built atop an eco-cosmology centered in atoning redemption and compassionate resurrection wherein we each take back control of our destinies built on the simplest of constructions, that of faith, hope and love.

R.E. Slater
October 13, 2024

Processual Archaelology and Whiteheadian Process Philosophy

amazon link

Whiteheadian process philosophy is an integral philosophy of everything. It is how the world works; how the world developed; and how humanity came to be as birthed within a processual cosmology. In a far looser context specific to process systems themselves it will be noted that all sciences - including that of evolutionary and archaeological studies - are taking into their accounts of creation and human development the ideation of "processual systems" and how those entangled matrices have impacted one another.

The science-filled descriptors of "processual evolution" may not be exactly Whiteheadian in nature but are Whiteheadian by reference and observation to the processual creation we are bound to and how it morphs and gleans over-and-over-and-over, again-and-again-and-again, moment-by-moment. It is how the world works.

So then, by way of illustrating Whitehead's processual observations at work in a non-Whiteheadian processual context - that of science - let us briefly review the obtuse discussion below watching how it reflects how science might interact with the constructs of latent and dynamic processual systems as observed by Whitehead in the 1920s and 1930s.

R.E. Slater

November 15, 2022

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https://prezi.com/dyy52z9kue9i/processual-archaeology/

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYXledM5qJ

What is the ‘process’ in cultural process

and in processual archaeology?

article link

Posted on May 15, 2020 by sooteris kyritsis

(continued from 12/03/19)

SHIFTING MEANINGS OF CULTURAL PROCESS

I suspect that what made the concept of cultural process difficult to discuss in the 1970s and 1980s was that it was a ‘vogue word’ – a word that was used to show that the user had acquired the term and all the supposed intellectual accessories that went with it (Service, 1969). M. Johnson (1999: 188) correctly suggested that conceptual ambiguity was exacerbated because the term process could be ‘used by an author in one sense and read in quite another’. This ambiguity allowed an unremarked shift in the meaning of the term over time.

Binford (1968b; see also Binford and Binford, 1968b) not only recognized the difference between the category of processes comprising the synchronic operation family and the diachronic evolution family, but he also noted that the archaeological record had been created by human behaviors, among other processes, and that the creation processes comprised a different category (Figure 2). He argued that an archaeologist must distinguish between explaining the archaeological record – a modern static phenomenon –and an extinct cultural system – a past dynamic phenomenon.

A processual archaeologist seeks to understand ‘processual relationships among various classes of material items in the dynamics of cultural systems’, but such understanding can only come after one has explained observations made on the archaeological record [which] necessarily involves coping with problems of process. We attempt to explain similarities and differences in archaeological remains in terms of the functioning of material items in a cultural system and the processual features of the operation or evolution of the cultural systems responsible for the varied artifact forms, associations, and distributions observable in the ground. (Binford, 1968b: 273)

In the last quoted sentence, the wording before the second ‘and’ refers to behavioral processes that create the archaeological record; the words after that refer to the dynamic cultural processes (both synchronic operational and diachronic evolutionary) at work when the culture existed.

The distinction is made by an archaeologist interested in contributing to anthropological theory (Binford, 1962). It, along with Schiffer’s (1976) more detailed discussion, ultimately led to refocusing the processual approach not on what might be thought of as the ultimate goal of identifying category 2 processes – those involving the operation and evolution of dynamic cultural systems – but on the more archaeologically proximate goal of category 1 processes – what became known as processes that result in the formation of the archaeological record (Schiffer, 1987). (I use 1 and 2 merely to signify order of analysis.) By the middle 1980s, for example, the text of an edited book entitled Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology, comprising 14 chapters authored by 16 archaeologists (Dickens and Ward, 1985), hardly mentions category 2 (cultural) processes and instead focuses nearly exclusively on category 1 (formation) processes.

Schiffer (1988) highlighted the distinctiveness of the two categories when he distinguished between ‘reconstruction theory’ (concerning category 1 processes) and ‘social theory’ (concerning category 2 processes). In her introduction to the recent volume Processual Archaeology, A.L. Johnson (2004) suggests that processes involve how a cultural system operates and also how the archaeological record is formed.

Additional evidence that formation processes usurped the priority of cultural processes is found in recent perspectives on Wauchope’s dilemma. Keegan (1991) suggests that at least some processes of interest are the behavioral processes that created the archaeological record, and others are the cultural processes or dynamics of an existing culture. Following Terrell (1986), Keegan (1991: 186–7) indicates that ‘cultural processes are the unfolding patterns of variability through time in conformity with nomothetic principles’. Terrell (1986) seems to have skirted Wauchope’s dilemma by suggesting that repetitive archaeological patterns were the results of predictable types of patterned human behavior. Echoing Kroeber (1948), Cunningham (2003: 391) indicates that ‘causal processes interact and combine in the creation of material patterns’.

This results in three things:

First, a particular pattern ‘can be created by entirely different sets of causal processes’ (2003: 392); this is equifinality (Lyman, 2004).

Second, analytical reconfiguration of processes allows one to ‘explain behavior that may differ substantially from any modern situation’ (Cunningham, 2003: 394). And,

Third, different processes and combinations thereof create different patterns in the material record (2003: 395).

Identifying which processes and combinations thereof create which patterns is not only the goal of formation process studies (Schiffer, 1987) and middle range research (Cunningham, 2003), but it is, seemingly, now of importance equal to that of identifying the cultural, social, and behavioral processes that processual archaeologists originally sought.

DISCUSSIONS OF CULTURAL PROCESS BY PROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS

Eisenberg (1971) argued that Deetz’s (1965) analysis exemplifies processual archaeology because it adopts the view of a culture as a system and seeks to understand the role of kinds of artifacts (in Deetz’s case, ceramic decorations) in a cultural system. It was in fact a systems-theory perspective that produced the two most detailed discussions of cultural processes by archaeologists of which I am aware. One was by David Clarke; the other was by Frank Hole and Robert Heizer.

Clarke (1968: 22) wrote that the ‘primary processes are those of inevitable variation, multilinear development, invention, diffusion and cultural selection. Combined in many permutations and circumstances these processes give rise to such complex processes as acculturation, and cultural growth, decay and disintegration’. He explicitly defined a process as ‘a vector which describes a series of states of an entity or system undergoing continuous change in space or time’ (Clarke, 1968: 42, 668). Clarke (1968:43) believed that a ‘general system model . . . should be representative of cultural processes at several levels within a sociocultural unit’. He sought ‘a model for archaeological processes – archaeological entities changing as special kinds of dynamic systems, susceptible to analysis in terms of general systems theory’ (1968: 72). He indicated that ‘We should not expect the processes that operate upon cultures or culture groups to be the same as those that operate upon artifact attributes, although since the former entities are compounds of the latter elements we might expect the processes appropriate to higher entities to integrate the simpler processes as well’ (1968: 409). The first part of the immediately preceding sentence echoes Wauchope’s dilemma, and the last part concerns the magnitude and scale of processes.

Clarke (1968) lists various processes and provides a detailed and relatively lengthy

statement on category 2 (cultural, behavioral, social) processes that he thought operated on or within most sociocultural entities. He specified three ‘general processes’ ontogeny, migration, interaction – and then suggested that each was manifest in various ways by development of variants, decrease of variety, increase of variety, and transformation of variety of cultural elements (Clarke, 1968: 409–10). The problem, Clarke thought, was to derive a ‘nested hierarchy of socio-archaeological processes’ – processes that linked sociocultural change to change in artifacts of whatever scale (Clarke, 1968:411); this is an effort to resolve Wauchope’s dilemma. Each process Clarke listed is a general kind that includes more specific kinds of processes. Many of his processes fall within the diachronic evolutionary family.

Changes in Hole and Heizer’s multi-edition introductory textbook capture the growing importance of culture processes in archaeology. There is minimal mention of culture processes in the first two editions (Hole and Heizer, 1965, 1969), but the 1969 edition contains a discussion of the importance of systems theory to understanding cultural dynamics. The third edition (Hole and Heizer, 1973: 439) discusses cultural processes explicitly. 

The term ‘process’ or ‘processes’ crops up frequently in the writings of scientific archeology, and it is also used in history, in manufacturing, and in analysis. As we understand the term colloquially it refers to the sequential set of operations that lead from A to B . . . [Given examples in history, manufacturing and research one] can readily see that process means two quite different things. First, it may refer to a sequence of events. Second, it may refer to the causes of the sequence of events. In both meanings, process is conceptually linked with the states or conditions of the things under observation at different times. As process is used in archeology, it refers to an analysis of the factors that cause changes in state.

[I will suggest that Alfred North Whitehead's titled work, "Process and Reality" goes into the state of processual relationships in a far, far deeper manner than what is gleaned here in this article. - re slater]

The authors provide the same discussion in an abridged version of their book (Hole and Heizer, 1977: 358), where they also define ‘process’ in the glossary as ‘the operation of factors that result in a change of culture’ (1977: 387). Note that Hole and Heizer indicate that a process can be a simple description of a sequence of events, or it can refer to cause(s) of that sequence. Given processual archaeology’s hopes to explain the archaeological record rather than just describe it (Lyman and O’Brien, 2004), a reasonable inference is that processualists sought to identify causal processes that operated prehistorically.

One of the alleged benefits of archaeologists adopting systems theory was that ‘questions phrased in terms of [systems] concepts direct our attention away from institutions and events and toward processes, away from efforts to discover the first appearance of particular cultural practices and toward efforts to understand their gradual evolution,and away from constructions of these events that are relatively hard to define in terms of archaeological observations toward ones that are more sensitive to the data with which we deal’ (Plog, 1975: 215). Plog is unclear, but I suspect he hoped to identify dynamic cause(s) rather than describe static events in temporal terms. Thus perhaps Plog was concerned with how a cultural system operates. Salmon (1978: 175), after all, pointed out that ‘anthropologists were engaged in analyzing social and cultural systems long before the advent of modern systems theory’ (see for example Kluckhohn’s [1951] discussion of Linton [1936]). This is particularly evident if one is aware of the structural–functional approaches in anthropology early in the 20th century, and also of the typical definition of a system as the relationships (mechanical, structural, functional)between entities comprising the system (Hill, 1977; Maruyama, 1963; Plog, 1975;Salmon, 1978). Systems theory seems to be preadapted to studying the dynamic operation (static state of being) of a cultural system.

When Clarke wrote his magnum opus, he modeled his recommendations for archaeological research on systems theory. But he did so with the following explicit and emphatic caution:

"It would be all too easy to take systems theory as our model for archaeological [that is, sociocultural] processes and the cultural entities that generate them, without isolating precisely the kind of system these entities represent. This would simply extend systems theory and its terminology as yet another vague analogy of no practical potential." (Clarke, 1968: 39)

Because in Clarke’s (1968: 39) view, anthropologists were ‘only just beginning to analyze social systems in [systems theory] terms’, he devoted the majority of the nearly 700 pages of Analytical Archaeology to building a model of culture, including artifacts, as a system. He used systems theory concepts and terms such as ‘feedback’ and ‘homeostasis’ in his modeling efforts, but his cultural processes were not categorized by him as the generic deviation counteracting ones of the first cybernetics meant to study stasis nor the deviation amplifying ones of the second cybernetics meant to study change (Maruyama, 1963). Rather, they were ‘technocomplex repatterning’, ‘culture group repatterning’, ‘acculturation’, ‘diffusion’, ‘invention’, and the like (Clarke, 1968: 410–12). Flannery (1968, 1972), on the other hand, categorized the cultural processes he identified (seasonality, scheduling, centralization, segregation) as either one or the other of these two general categories (deviation counteracting or amplifying), and he, like Clarke, identified and named specifically cultural processes.

A significant influence on processual archaeologists’ focus on cultural processes was Maruyama’s (1963) discussion of the second cybernetics, or ‘deviation-amplifying mutual causal processes’ (see Flannery, 1968, 1972; Hill, 1977; Plog, 1975 for an introduction). In his 16-page article, Maruyama used the term ‘process’ 40 times, or 2.5 times per page. What Maruyama means by the term is never explicit. I suggest that he meant several things, including dynamic causes, relationships (mechanical, functional) between variables or entities, and influences of one variable or entity on another. Perhaps because it is unclear whether he meant static mechanical relations or causally dynamic ones, to this day some authors define a cultural process such as ‘centralization’ as ‘the degree of linkage between the various subsystems and the highest-order controls of a cultural system’ (Spencer, 1997: 215). This definition does not identify a dynamic cause though it does imply some kind of mechanical or functional relationship between phenomena. The name of a process has been applied to both a dynamic cause and its result. This seems to be the way that Maruyama (1963) used the term process, and his use likely influenced archaeologists.

(to be continued)

R. Lee Lyman

University of Missouri-Columbia, USA

Are Fragmentation, Trauma, and Demoralization at the Root of Mass Shootings?

         

Dear Reader,

Uvalde. Buffalo. Tulsa. Sacramento. Indianapolis. Boulder. Charleston. Orlando. Aurora. Columbine. These are just a select few of an ever-increasing list of places we have come to associate with mass shootings in the United States. Each time, we ask ourselves, "Why?" Why does this continue to happen more in the U.S. than in any other country on earth?

This was the question I explored in a recent blog I wrote for the Cobb Institute. Now I hope you’ll join me for a dynamic discussion about this important issue on Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 7:30pm Eastern/4:30pm Pacific. As I wrote in the blog,

"Rather than just arguing about whether the problem stems from the individuals or the guns, I’d like to suggest that the roots may lie even deeper. And until we are willing to follow the threads all the way down, we will never find a way out of the crisis of mass shootings. I strongly believe that the roots of this problem are cultural fragmentation, an epidemic of trauma, and widespread demoralization. In other words, we are living in a sick society that is producing mass shootings out of its sickness."

Blessings,


Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D.
Director, Process & Faith

Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D., is the director of Process and Faith with the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology (CST). She also serves as director of the John Cobb Legacy Fund with the Institute for Ecological Civilization. Sheri earned her Ph.D. in Religion: Process Studies from CST. In her work as a writer, teacher, and spiritual mentor, Dr. Kling draws from wisdom and mystical traditions, relational worldviews, depth psychology, and the intersection of spirituality and science to help people transform their lives. She is the creator of Deeper Rhythm and Transforming Women as well as a faculty member of the Haden Institute. Her personal website is www.sherikling.com.

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Photo courtesy Kelly Sikkema

Are Fragmentation, Trauma, and Demoralization at the Root of Mass Shootings?

https://cobb.institute/blog/process-in-praxis/are-fragmentation-trauma-and-demoralization-at-the-root-of-mass-shootings/

by Sheri Kling

Jun. 15, 2022

Uvalde. Buffalo. Tulsa. Sacramento. Indianapolis. Boulder. Charleston. Orlando. Aurora. Columbine. These are just a select few of an ever-increasing list of places we have come to associate with mass shootings in the United States. Each time, we ask ourselves, “Why?” Why does this continue to happen more in the U.S. than in any other country on earth? According to National Public Radio, there have been 246 mass shootings in the first 22 weeks of 2022. That adds up to more than 11 shootings per week. Meanwhile, the New York Times identifies a “disturbing new pattern” of shooters who are under the age of 21.

They point to such causes as online bullying, aggressive marketing of guns to boys, and a “worsening adolescent mental health crisis” that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Frank T. McAndrew, a Knox College psychology professor, describes the young men typically involved in such shootings as people who “feel like losers, and they have an overwhelming drive to show everybody they are not on the bottom.”

We might be tempted to quickly conclude that such assailants are “mentally ill” and leave it at that. But those of us who have struggled with depression, anxiety, or other conditions cringe at the lumping of never violent people into the same category as those who would pick up arms to kill. While trying to understand the mental state of shooters is valid, other justice-oriented people voice concerns over the number of guns in the U.S. and seek a legislative solution to keep guns out of the hands of those who would use them to murder.

Yet rather than just arguing about whether the problem stems from the individuals or the guns, I’d like to suggest that the roots may lie even deeper. And until we are willing to follow the threads all the way down, we will never find a way out of the crisis of mass shootings. I strongly believe that the roots of this problem are cultural fragmentation, an epidemic of trauma, and widespread demoralization. In other words, we are living in a sick society that is producing mass shootings out of its sickness.

Fragmentation

We are a fragmented people – societally, interpersonally, and intrapersonally. We can see it in our politics, in our lingering racism, in our lack of close relationships and the resulting loneliness and social isolation. We can see it in skyrocketing increases in depression and drug use. We even see it in our addictive use of technology that, while promising to connect us, often leaves us even more isolated.

The dominant understandings of reality that lie unquestioned at the bedrock of Western culture are at least a part of that fragmentation. The Western worldview is dualistic in its separation of mind from body, and humans from nature. It’s also still stubbornly mechanistic – seeing reality as made up of “dead” matter, billiard balls that are pushed around by external forces – even as we learn from biological and ecological sciences and quantum physics that nothing in the natural world behaves as a machine. Such dualistic and mechanistic worldviews pull us apart and deny the validity of our experience. They see humans and the world as objects to be exploited rather than sacred subjects with which we might be in cooperative and respectful relationship.

Trauma

In the late 1990s, Vincent Felitti of the Kaiser Permanente health system in San Diego and Robert Anda of the Centers for Disease Control conducted a ground-breaking study on the effects of adverse childhood experience (ACE) on adult health and behavior. Known as the ACEs study, it explored the early life experience of 17,000 participants. Ten categories of adverse childhood experience were ultimately identified that included physical/emotional/sexual abuse, having an alcoholic or drug abuser in the household, physical/emotional neglect, and divorce or an incarcerated parent. Based on their responses, everyone was given an ACE score that represented the numerical total of each category experienced.

Photo courtesy Kat J

The findings were stunning. Only one third of participants had an ACE score of zero, one in six had a score of four or more, and one in nine had a score of five or more. The researchers found an alarmingly strong relationship between a higher ACE score and the leading causes of morbidity, mortality, chronic disease, and risky behavior.

We are a traumatized people.

When mass shootings happen, we want to know why. We desperately grasp for explanations by understanding the shooters’ motives. But in a recent article in ACEs Too High News, Jane Ellen Stevens argues that dwelling on motive just gets us a “useless answer to the wrong question.” The right questions to ask about, for example, Payton Gendron, who targeted the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, might include: “What happened to this person? What happened to a beautiful baby boy to turn him into an 18-year-old killer spouting racist screed?” Stevens draws from the work of Jillian Peterson and James Delaney who studied every mass shooting since 1966 and found that “the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying.” Stevens goes on to tell us that

The effects of ACEs begin showing up in childhood. Kids experiencing trauma act out. They can’t focus. They can’t sit still. Or they withdraw. Fight, flight or freeze—that’s a normal and expected response to trauma. So, they have difficulty learning. The schools that respond by suspending or expelling them just further traumatize them. When they get older, if they have no positive intervention from a caring adult at home or in school, in a clinic or other organization who is trained to understand trauma, they find unhealthy ways to cope. They turn to addictions of all types—alcohol and other drugs, violence, stealing, lying, overeating, gambling, thrill sports, etc.—to soothe themselves to endure their trauma and the effects of their trauma, such as depression or violence.

She goes on to recommend that communities establish a forensic ACE review team to investigate the childhood experiences of each mass shooter and analyze every step in that person’s life when an intervention could have changed the course and, possibly, the outcome. How much healthier might our communities be if we took seriously the prevention of trauma?

It’s also critical to remember that people can heal from trauma. In my own life, deep inner work and spiritual practices like dream work have helped. Wounded people wound. But is this the end of the story? According to writer and theologian Henri Nouwen,

Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.

Photo coutesy Nick Herasimenka

Photo courtesy STNGR Industries

Demoralization

It’s not just fragmentation and trauma that are making American culture sick. According to John F. Schumaker, a retired psychology academic and author of “The Demoralized Mind,” “Western consumer culture is creating a psycho-spiritual crisis that leave us disoriented and bereft of purpose.” He argues that many people who are identified as depressed are actually suffering from an “existential disorder.” He writes,

Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment. The world loses its credibility, and former beliefs and convictions dissolve into doubt, uncertainty and loss of direction. Frustration, anger and bitterness are usual accompaniments, as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or losing battle. The label ‘existential depression’ is not appropriate since, unlike most forms of depression, demoralization is a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on the person’s life.

Demoralization is the realistic response. Let’s let that sink in for a moment.

Schumaker points out that the core characteristics of consumer culture, including individualism, overwork, hurriedness, debt, and hyper-competition, all affect us negatively and the typical sources of “wisdom, social and community support, spiritual comfort, intellectual growth and life education have dried up.” Schumaker notes that, unlike in the past, people no longer have guiding principles or philosophies of life to give them an “existential compass.”

In the absence of such a compass, we gravitate toward what Noam Chomsky called a “philosophy of futility” in which people feel powerless and insignificant. Schumaker also points to the lack of what Raoul Naroll called a “moral net” or cultural infrastructure that meets “the key psycho-social-spiritual needs of its members, including a sense of identity and belonging, co-operative activities that weave people into a community, and shared rituals and beliefs that offer a convincing existential orientation.”

We are a demoralized people.

People who are dehumanized, demoralized, and dispirited by these forces see the whole world as disappointing and life itself loses its credibility. Though we may be tempted to demand that people just “suck it up,” we’d be wise to listen to Jiddu Krishnamurti, who said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

If we are a sick society, what might make us well?

I believe that broader adoption of a process-relational worldview would certainly help, by showing us that at all levels of reality, we are interconnected, dynamically in process, and creatively empowered to actualize value in a world that we belong to. In a relational world, we are never alone, we matter, and we can experience positive change, no matter how fragmented, traumatized, or demoralized we may be today.

Can I say for sure that such a change would stop mass shootings? No. But surely a healthier society, with healthier people who aren’t fragmented, traumatized, and demoralized would enjoy more creativity, peace, harmony, and beauty. That is the world I want to create.

-- Sheri Kling

My Observations from 2021

2021 YEAR IN REVIEW

As a Christian who wishes to lead out with the Love of God I feel quite passionate about those condemn and judge. How is my response loving when I speak resistance to falsehoods and verbal retorts to those who persist in their folly leading others to do the same?? I don't know. Ask the prophets of the bible torn with similar emotions. Or Jesus, who didn't hold back his exchanges with religionists as they spoke lies and blasphemies in the name of God. My emotions come from a deep place and yet, I don't feel they express enough the feelings of the oppressed, unwanted, and unseen. In my small attempt I pray for unity between all Jesus followers and for humanity in general... especially for those suffering inhumane conditions both here in America and around the world. Below are several observations I had made during 2021. They are in no particular order.

R.E. Slater

January 13, 2022

Trump attacks "Black Lives Matter" Protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, and
privatized squadrons of his own quasi-military command.

JUNE 2021

To the charade our former president performed a year ago may I say, "We hold up Jesus, not a book. Into a religious book we might write any story we want; but in Jesus, the story we write must be one of love. This is the action and spirit we hold up which banner welcomes! all. Even as the church sign said contrary to Trumpland's white nationalism of unwelcome, and deep unwillingness, to engage in embracing our brothers and sisters of any color, faith, gender, or sex. Here, on display for the world to see, is a White Gospel held up ironically in front of a social justice wielding church. The Christian White Gospel is not the gospel of the Bible which declares to love one another. To these false White leaders of the Christian church we reject their teachings, their desecrating lies, and their false leadership. They are of the devil and not of God - for ye will know God's disciples by God's love. - res

JUNE 2021

Here is the profane desecration of the Word of God by the leader of Free Democracy held on the steps of a social justice preaching church which actively practices, ministers, and seeks out the underfed, homeless, besotted, and addicted men and women around the District of Columbia area. Ironically, behind the self-righteous and proud President stands a sign saying, "All are welcomed." Clearly the optics do not measure up to the "White" House's active apartheid policies against people of color. If it was, the President would've bent down on one knee seeking repentance in confessional prayer for the loss of black lives under police arrests; and with him, his follows who gathered a summer ago to pray for the nation. But like the White church's blasphemy, so too has Donald Trump followed in his own way by holding up a bible testifying to the God of love who is unknown, unread, and unpracticed by politicians and their religious voters. Each claiming Christ as the center of their lives when in words and deeds there is no such truth found in these deceivers to the faith of Jesus. - res

Trump inciting Neo-Nationalists to attack the United States Capital (1.6.2021)

DECEMBER 2021

To the Christian anti-woke crowd, we have discussed social justice, ecological justice, Black Lives Matter, Gay and Womanist theology over the years. And yes, all through the lenses of God's love - not through God's condemnation and judgment - which false doctrine subsequently conflates a fictitious, idolatrous god with the real YHWH-God found in Jesus. If, as a Christian, you're for secular-religious and political division, then continue down the road of destruction with the Christian neo-fascist crowd who are speaking a false gospel of Christ. If, however, like many penitent Christians, you're beginning to see the bible in a whole new light through the eyes of a loving God, rather than a profane God, then welcome. We believe the church and its people are here to heal, minister, bear burdens, restore, renew, and redeem in everyway possible. Any other gospel of self-righteous condemnation is welcomed to take a hike. That kind of bible is as unwanted as is the type of heathen God it shouts from the rooftops to legalist ears. - res

DECEMBER 2021

The Spirit does overwhelm my soul and trouble me at all times and in all seasons. To his voice my heart cannot be silent. It is restless in words and discovery, and must speak into all evil occasions and events so strong are God's words upon my breast, in my ears, and within my soul. God's jagged voice cannot be silent. He demands all Christian faithful, all Patriots of democracy, to resist perilous church doctrines and white supremacists and nationalistic policies dooming the Christian faith to anarchy - and with it, America too. So I write, and speak, and cannot stop God's voice urging peace and love, unity and stout resistance to all forms of false conservative gospels. Gospels which are unloving, espousing unpatriotic fascism , and seeking to tear down society in its attacks against America's expanding democratic union to all, by all, and for all peoples who live herein. - res

Trump Neo-Nationalists attacking the United States Capital (1.6.2021)

DECEMBER 2021

I have been driving around this morning running errands while listening to  what is advertised as "Christian" radio.... From listening to the Gospel airwaves I've discovered we are living in the End Times. Which means to many White Christians that we wait around for Jesus to come and do nothing in the meantime for the refugee, the immigrant, the Black man or woman and their families, the inner cities, the blown up schools and families in our districts, or the ecological pollution all about us.

It is believed by the White church that God is judging us once again (for the millionth time). This time by giving us bad democratic leadership (aka President Biden), a deadly global pandemic, and related climate disasters. Who believe the Covid vaccines are killing people and that no one is being honest about these deaths. And that Donald Trump is our only true political Savior who only wants what's best for America (especially for those of us who are true Patriots).

As I drove and turned through the Christian channels these topics were repeated by multiple news sources. By Christian media counselors sympathizing with callers. By energetic preachers telling me what the bible was saying as they read it's words magically and mystically without thot for science, historical literature, or its socio-cultural context. What these sincere preachers thundered across the airwaves was gospel - and we are ungodly fools for disagreeing or saying otherwise to them.

Since this morning's experience I've concluded the earth is flat, the moon landing was a Hollywood stunt, my church is nuts, all people are mad, and the Creator/Redeemer God whom Christians worship is as mad as they are.

However, what I do know is this:

• God is love.

• God does not judge or punish us but would help us make loving choices at all times in our lives.

• That our sin judges us as we reap what we sow.

• That the eschaton of God's redemption is always actively happening despite the horrible natural phenomena we live through, experience, or think marks some kind of eschatological ending to Earth.

• That God gave nature its own freewill as He did us, though the church seems always to lean towards some form of religious meme of scapegoating, blaming, and interpretive dogmatic dominionism.

• That God is not only holy and perfect but also LOVING in all His ways despite what his nutso children preach about Him from their dogmatic pulpits full of blinders.

• And at the last, "Christian" radio is no better than Fox News and other gaslighting social medias and propagandists.

- res

Trump Neo-Nationalists attacking the United States Capital (1.6.2021)

DECEMBER 2021

https://youtu.be/Qa6jzo0hf6Y

For very few of my readers what I will say he will be profound. For many, many others, it will be deemed gibberish, ungodly, unbiblical, liberal, or of the devil. But what is not realized is how our worlds are continually deconstructing and trying to glom things together to help us make sense of our internal fractures.

I love the idea of skepticism, especially in the religious sense. Pete Rollins calls it a "religious or Christian atheism" willfully committed into our internalized faith-beliefs which might help religionists, or Christians, make sense of their professed charters of faith when neither the temple or church can anymore.

If we haven't allowed ourselves to question who we are, and what is motivating us towards a structuralized form of faith, we will not be able to survive the many destructions which arise testing, or breaking, our faith allegiance. If allowed arightly, these life events will helpfully expand our definition of God and our faith.

Breakage is a good thing when it comes, however deeply painful and unwanted, such events may be. Personal loss is hell many times over - we ache for those who have great unwanted loss in their lives.

And the spiritual loss of faith is a deep, deep darkness. For myself, and many others who have survived these times, we may term these personal epochs as "the death of God" unwanted, barren in all its ways, and truly lost to all plans or purposes.

Our personal faith will always be tested and even, perhaps, suffer a heart-numbing death. One which will need healing and recomposition back to a rightful, truly death-defying reimaging of our lives and faith. A healing which might propel us forward physically or spiritually towards healthier, uplifting ways of living with the burdens suffered. The other choice is spiritual death. Death of soul, of spirit, of a world of relationships waiting to be encountered.

For some, this is how Christ comes to reimage us through his atoning work from death unto life. That in loss to our former faith, circumstances, or loving relationships, we might be revitalized in our losses and personal spirit-annihilation to then rise from the grave of pain and suffering to find God's love and beauty beyond the religious ascriptions of man.

Ruptured faiths are times of deep re-birth. Ruptures will never end in this life, but some are much greater than others. We are tested again-and-again to respond to dying-to-self-to-lean-into Christ's newness of life.

This is what is meant in the existentialized view of a "Christianized experience of atheism, or loss of faith." But its post-structural resurrection back into the inured world can be one of sublimely divine experience. Its an awakening, or Spirit-enlightenment, which can only be experienced.

In Christian lingo its a renewal or rebirth. But whatever, or however it is, it disturbs, is restless, and seeks to live without the plasticity of artificial forms and functions.

- res

Trump Neo-Nationalists attacking the United States Capital (1.6.2021)

DECEMBER 2021

Let me pose the question again as I had months and months earlier... "If Roe is struck down then who will care for all the unwanted orphans?" Our agencies cannot keep up with abandoned children so I would expect hardship to be experienced by the boys and girls who are given a chance at life but left parentless and institutionalized through their childhood and teen years.

Paraguay's policies show this as a real event which America will too very quickly if, and when, Roe is overturned. Wouldn't it be a shame to be spared life as a possible aborted baby to only then live in the inhumane conditions as an unwanted orphan destined to live in toxic foster homes, institutions, or churches? To win one war is to neglect the war next to come. The church can do better. Let's plan for the loving care not only of non-aborted babies, but of all unwanted children being raised in soul-killing locales of neglect and hate. - res

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/01/americas/paraguay-pregnancy-child-abuse-sexual-violence-intl/index.html

DECEMBER 2021

Addendum: Then there are groups like World Vision and Compassion International which never seem to run out of orphan cards. I suspect, with Roe's dismissal, Pro-Lifer groups will simply walk away from their subsequent responsibilities to care for the unaborted, having ironically, never enacted their pro-lifer policies except at the ballot box - even as neglected children "blow up" on their watch across rural and urban areas. (In our West Michigan area alone there are approximately 7500 children between ages 7-21 wandering fields, village townships, and city streets. An are ripe with hundreds of bible-preaching bible churches. I find this amazing and quite sad.)

Let us not forget the imprisoned Blacks forgotten behind prison bars. Or the elderly who receive very little, if any, human care unless they have money to pay for it. Or regional wars across the globe waging war, wanting more guns, and fostering hate. Or the impoverished families who stay invisible to the pro-rights group. Yes, their names will be invisible in every sense of the word - even should Roe be overturned.

Pro-lifers do not see the "living" only their own self-interested vestments. The plight of children and families of foreign refugees, civil war victims, and mass migrations of the destitute will continue o flow - but pro-lifers give their Christmas boxes to Samaritan's Purse at church, "call it a day," and go home.

If life is to be spared, then we are to begin planning now - how to help, house, care and nurture all the little ones saved to life. NOT by passing them on to cold institutions or unsafe churches and families. As example, we do not need to look any farther than the Christian organization, EXODUS, which was a huge 30-year fail for all involved.

Let's not replicate this again with helpless children. Should Roe be overturned may the church with the government figure out how to save these children into loving homes and environments. Peace. - res

Trump Neo-Nationalists attacking the United States Capital (1.6.2021)

SEPTEMBER 2021

I'm glad to say that many on this list I know, or know well, at the ORT Center. Kudos to all the new student entering this coming year. And yes, open and relational PROCESS theology is the way to go for all ex-evangelicals seeking to honor Jesus and reaffirm God's love for humanity through and through and through both in this life and the next processual life to come.

It is far more thoroughly godly to say God is love than to say God loves only some whom God choses. God loves all - and in God's atonement all are offered salvation by whatever means the Spirit is able to reawaken the proffered soul.

For those who don't spiritually awaken, for reasons of a stubborn or willingly blinded free will, God is there throughout that individual's life and death. I think of many Christians acting out their faith with no real Jesus-faith present in their lives. Conscripted faith is not relational faith. Working and fellowshipping in the church does not mean walking in the Spirit. Too many times we see religious people with no sense of love or caretake of others being rule-bound or dogmatic. The Pharisees were Jesus' classic protagonists.

For myself, I reject both Christian Universalism and the Christian hell. This latter is the conjecture of the human mind sealed by the mythos of the Greek underworld then later underscored in the medieval writings of Dante within the early (Catholic) church.

I follow the belief that one's faith must walk if it is to talk. As such, we are to take responsibility for earth-and-humanity caretake. By providing wellbeing to all. And must be accountable for community and people if Christ-filled redemption is to mean anything at all.

As corollary, we cannot do nothing while sitting around yapping "Jesus is Coming" while waiting for death to take us, or the Lord to return. Jesus was God's return to earth. In the meantime we are to heal, bind up the wounds of the suffering, give cups of cold water to those without, minister to the one laying by the roadside, show mercy and grace. We have the oil of salvation in our lamps. Now go out and use it!

Another thought. I follow free agency all the way up - or all the way down - via processual life (the former idea of heaven) or processual death (the former idea of annihilation, but not hell). By some means, our futures are immortalized through either participation with God, or not... by building salvific processual processes in this life and the next. Always with God and never alone.

One last thought. The triunity (or trinity) of God is a teaming endeavor to which the Trinunity's fourth apex is that of creation. An significant apex added to God's fellowship circle of interiors. It is the very organic cosmos of creation itself.  Thus making the Trinity a divine Rhombus (for those geometrists in our group). Whatever becomes... begins now... through us.... If all fails, God will still overcome in His divine partnership with the elements of creation which He first began with. God wishes to use all creation. This includes humanity... and especially His life-bestowing Remnant of Jesus disciples. Redemptive life becomes through the life-giving Spirit who works together with creation to determine - er, ENACT -  not by divine fiat, but by divine love, the salvation of all.

- res

Neo-Nationalists listening to Trump's rant before attacking the United States Capital (1.6.2021)

Commentary by VS

DECEMBER 2021

Religious fundamentalism is never satisfied. Your fundamentalism must look like *my* fundamentalism, which is the true, unadulterated, historic, “biblical” faith. While eating with some Reformed, Bible church-type "friends" at Wheaton College, they discovered I was (at the time) Pentecostal. One said, "You may leave the table." I was too "liberal" for them, despite my own, hyper-conservative beliefs. My family got rid of our television, didn't go to dances or movies, and didn't use playing cards (gambling adjacent, I guess). But we weren't spiritual enough for these Defenders of the Faith. They *really* believed the Bible. Some in their camp were offended when Elisabeth Eliot, a woman, was allowed to speak in chapel. (One told me he wasn't sure Black people weren't better off as slaves; his dad wrapped his luggage in duct tape when he flew.)

Around 2003, conservatives began breaking from the Episcopal Church, finding more conservative bishops in Africa to affiliate with. One local priest leading such an effort—I believe he literally led a procession of the “faithful” out of the church and down the road—got more than he bargained for when his newly chosen African bishop informed him that he wasn’t qualified for priesthood himself because he’d been divorced. (There was a dispute in my church growing up as to whether my uncle could serve as Sunday School superintendent because he'd been divorced years ago. As one board member expressed it before catching himself, “If we were to allow undesirables ….”) These breakaway efforts led to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (“confessing” as in the “true” church, like the heroic German Christians who opposed the Nazis) and Anglican Church in North America. (ACNA's name is a bit confusing; for clarification, they're not part of the Anglican Communion but more like a "Roman Catholic Church of N America" that isn't in fellowship with Rome.)

This fundamentalist way of thinking is why there are thousands of Christian denominations/sects, formed over disagreements on nearly every issue of doctrine and practice imaginable, each insisting the Bible is clear and that *they’re* the ones practicing “biblical” Christianity, unlike the folks in the church across the street.

Trump Neo-Nationalists attacking the United States Capital (1.6.2021)