RE Slater - Personal Update

https://www.maryfreebed.com/

To my readers,

Hello,

I've had a bit of a setback this month and last. Though I was productive through the month of February I was undergoing at the same time a very difficult foot-and-ankle infectious pain due to a surgical infection inhabiting those spaces over the past nine years at my first surgery.

Though I have had ups-and-downs over the past nine years these past several weeks have become unbearable from February through mid-April. I've experienced more pain than I could humanly endure. Consequently, I decided to go with another healthcare provider and all that they offered, including a new doctor, who could give to me counsel and direction. Which he did and who I was fortunate to find.

Basically, I knew I could no longer save my foot-and-ankle without risking internal organ damage because of PICC lines to be placed into my heart and all the heavy medication required to get me healthy again. This would not be an avenue I wished to revisit having had this done several times in the past.

So with my spouse attending my appointments with me, we have decided to lose the foot-and-ankle limb by having it removed.

This was done a week ago.

The healthcare system I switched to also offered an amazing rehabilitation center for amputees and people struggling with various disabilities. So once losing the foot-and-ankle my health issues have disappeared... although I have now traded a new set of health circumstances in recovering from a lost limb and learning to be self-caretaking for the next two months.

Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital

Restoring Hope and Freedom

After staying 3.5 days in surgical care I was then transferred to the disability center wherein I was able to graduate rapidly into self-care at home over a period of 4.5 days. This means I came home yesterday to struggle with residual pain and self-management issues. To help with any offsets, the rehabilitation center I had stayed in is providing "At-Home" nursing care, OT, PT, and nursing aides as needed.

So, as of yesterday, it has been one week since my radical surgery and recovery. I am at home presently working towards better health. This means in two months my half-leg should be healed and I will be able to be fitted with several foot-and-ankle prosthetics. Which also means I will be re-enrolled as an outpatient two or three days a week to learn how to walk again.

By mid-July of 2024, and after four months from first to last, I should be fully mobile with only ensuing health checkups over the next year or two.

And as I can, I will return to this website soon to work out what process philosophy, theology, process sciences, and all other disciplines and human pursuits might look like when using Whitehead's "philosophy of a living organism" (e.g., the universe; the earth; and ourselves as evolving processual entities).

Till then, use all the resources here to begin your own processual journey. Please pass along suggestions, needs, and ideas in the comment section.

To comment you have to be part of Google's membership which is free. When I see the comments - and if they are appropriate to the content - I will post them. If not, I will delete them. If users wish to speak to one another I can adjust my site to allow for conversation but discourage any frivolous comments or weblinks not pertinent to the subject matter.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater

April 19, 2024

Personal Update: A Life Reconstructed, Part II

May-August 2023

Personal Update:

A Life Reconstructed

Part II

I'm back on heavy drugs again to clean out my body from the infection(s) I've borne over the past eight year since January 2016. Hence, my limited articles through this year.

Because I am conscientious about my conversations and commentary I do not wish to "dream walk" through my material as I present them. Especially as it tends to be "cutting edge" across a variety of topics. It takes a clear mind to imagine what can be in a world which fights for the old ways of disunity, isolation, and suspicion.

And with my present drug sedation I find keeping my focus can be a problem. The other difficulty is the lack of energy and exhaustion I bear through the day because of the infection-fighting drugs.

However, I hope to do what I can even as I have since the first of May 2023 of this year. All the while I am praying my health journey will find successful completion sometime in the first quarter of 2024 after several more foot-and-ankle surgeries as I have shown below.

As always, thank you for your support and prayers. Please take what has been offered here at Relevancy22 since 2011 to extend and expand process philosophy, theology, science, and ecology across all areas of endeavor.

We are in need of a world united by difference and love. As Friedrich Schleiermacher had well said, "There are miracles all around us." We just need to lift up our eyes and look around.

However, for those bearing personal cruelty, abuse, suffering, and oppression, let us alter Schleiermacher's statement just a bit and make as our own motto: "Be the miracle to those needing miracles." In this way we may rightfully say there are miracles all around us.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

September 19, 2023

Warning: Below is part of my health journey this summer. Some pictures will be ugly to look at while other pics show a bit of progress before collapse and failure. To that end my doctors have removed my internal prosthetic which I've had since 2016 (8 years ago).

At present, there is no structure in the empty space except medical cement in my foot. Thus the boot I'm wearing with restricted walking. Sometime later this November or December there will a second surgery (fourth this summer) should the infection(s) be gone.

The last images show a customized 3D printed durable titanium cage which will be implanted in the foot and ankle area. I have no idea what the structure will look like as opposed to the picture shown.

Then we wait again for any new infections to show up. If not, a third - and hopefully final - surgery will fuse the foot to the ankle.

Again, some pictures below will not be pretty to view however, in 2016 I had two very long (14-20") open wounds x 4" wide running along both sides of my calf (top and outer areas) with picc lines directly into the heart and a overworked eou d pump sucking out crap. That experience was a lot worse. I nearly didn't make it mentally or emotionally by the third month after reviving from a fully septic crisis.

- res

May-August 2023 with wound pump

May-August 2023 w/ wound pump; eventually there were 3 open wounds with a
fourth would opening up. Thus the removal of the internal foot-and-ankle prosthetic.

May-August 2023 with wound pump

Third surgery: September 2023 w/ removal of device

Next Surgery is the installation of a structural support device. (To implant
a new internal motility device risks a 35% rejection rate. Thus the cage.)

A third surgery fuses the foot to the ankle sans any infections...

Xrays of a foot fusion to the ankle

Personal Update - A Life Reconstructed, Part I

In 1903 Edvard Munch held an exhibition at the newly refurbished Kunsthandlung P. H. Beyer & Sohn in Leipzig, where Munch had been allocated the gallery’s skylit room. Eighteen paintings, inlaid in a light textile frame, were presented as a frieze in the room. Running as a horizontal band high up on three walls, the frieze essentially became a part of the room as a whole. The article therefore proposes to consider the exhibition as spatial art and examine it in light of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. The documentation of the exhibition is a unique source for understanding Munch’s “Frieze of Life” and its spatial representation, even as the paintings highlight the role of the exhibition room at the turn of the twentieth century. The exhibition room played an instrumental role in how Munch developed his art.

Alan Sorrell: A Life Reconstructed

Personal Update:

A Life Reconstructed

Part I

With apologies, I have been sick most of the summer dealing with a surgical infection from eight years ago. At the end of last summer of 2022, I was dealing with a newly opened abscess on my foot which I managed until May of this year when a surgeon opened up the foot to clean it out and sent me home to let the newly opened gash heal.

However, the surgery failed and necessitated a second surgery weeks later resulting in the addition of a wound pump for the rest of the summer... this time with thrice weekly nursing visits to the home. But again, the open would wouldn't heal despite the care. In fact it got worse.

At which point, after eight years of sloughing it out, it was time to remove the infected foot-and-ankle titanium prosthetic which held my foot together. One I broken in my early teens attempting to stop my fall over the edge of a cliff I had intentionally and poorly navigated. And upon the same limb which I had played physical sports until my early fifties when needing a total knee replacement.

This hopeful prosthetic was removed a week ago, cleaned of gunk, and cemented in place with a time-released antibiotic. Since there was now extra skin all was bound up without the miserable wound pump I had come to detest. Nine days have past in morbid pain from loss of device, crutching around on tired arms, and awaiting removal of cast some nine days out. Thankfully, we found a couple knee scooters which helped immeasurably giving relief to my aching body and spirit.

Once this surgery heals there will be a minimum of two more surgeries until there is no longer any infection and the foot can be fused to the ankle without addition of any more mechanical devices. If unsuccessful then there might be a future holding an amputation with the addition of a fully mechanical half-limb and incumbrances to come. Hopefully not. But it is why I waited so long before finally allowing the doctors to remove the original prosthesis.

Tomorrow I speak once again to infectious services to determine if a picc line through the arteries to the heart will be necessary or not. I expect it will require a month or more of antibiotic infusions which I will manage along with a nursing visit once a week to change out the port placed into my arm. But I am no stranger to this practice either as my first wounds eight years ago were far, far worse... being quite long and wide, travelling up-and-down several parts of my leg. It is the main reason I will not "suffer" a second internal prosthetic; the other being that 35% of these second surgeries fail in infections again.

At that time I found myself slipping into despair, if not depression, as I looked into a black pit badding me step forward one more step. The pain was overwhelming. The worse being the first three months - though the next five months thereafter were no picnic either. And then there was the constant severed nerve pain which lasted 4.5 years. It required a steely will beginning with refusing to step forward into an oblivion I might not come out... though I remember blackness to seem a fathomless comfort to the septic fevers rolling through my body.

Anyway, I've been taking these past summer months to catch up with life. Find a little time for introspection. And to rest from writing, which task I've done regularly since the fall of 2009 upon retirement. A retirement I've not only filled with poetry and writing on the cutting edge of a new theology - which I've placed on my other website - but to leave my job and volunteer church ministries to work within my community.

During these past retirement years I held committee and board positions on City, County, and College panels; became a certified Master Naturalist through MSU's extension program (including a 100 hours of community service); and joined over two dozen environmental organizations working, planting, burning, strategizing, creating, and building a living ecology in West Michigan with others who bore the same passion and veracity as myself.

In so doing, we have created the foundations necessary for empowering regional green infrastructures and green business practices to our part of West Michigan across local and state levels and all parts in-between. I could never have done this while working or raising a family. After 30+ years in technology and lay ministries I finally laid all aside and took the time to participate in creating healthy sustainability practices for habitat and clean water projects.

Over the last fifteen years I worked, volunteered, learned, and gave input across a number of ecological areas. Many of them politically unwanted but expediently necessary knowing the climate change coming upon us in the decades ahead. In these tasks I have greatly enjoyed being a part of community seeking to aide strangers via innumerable opportunities and probabilities. It was fun. And it gave to me the experience, perspective, and depth I needed to write of social contracts and personal enlightenments.

Now lately, one I get pass these remaining hard monts, I hope to continue working on both websites to leave with my family, friends, and interested readers helpful ways in which we might think about our personal value to one another and the greater good we might attempt for humanity. I see no reason not to thrive during these times of pandemic, socio-political upheaval, failure of religious institutions. At no time should we give in to adversity, perversity, calamity, bleakness, or short-sightedness. But at all times we are to give ourselves to diversity, modality, veracity, and tonality in the trying years ahead. It's what get's me up in the morning to create, destroy, rebuild, and envision communities of life.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

September 5, 2023

* * * * * * *

We will always rebuild

(a poem for the grieving)

by Jeanette LeBlanc

You are here.
You are here.

Even though everything smells like love and loss and burning.
Start with this.

You are here and it hurts.
It hurts because of all you’ve lost.
Your heart is a 3am siren, driving through that sucker punch bruise of a night sky.
Never a sign of anything good.

Here, nothing feels good.
Now you’ve begun.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy.
There is not enough air in the room.
The quilt on your bed is eight hundred pounds of weight keeping you from movement.
There is no going back

There is never any going back.
Now you’re getting somewhere.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon.
He is listening but does nothing.
There is nothing he can do.

You are on your knees in the grass,
clutching handfuls of earth.
This is progress.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you
It is the darkest night you’ve ever lived through
You’ve lived through.
You’ve lived.

Do you hear me?
You live.
You make it.
You survive.

There is a faint tinge of light on the horizon and you made it.
Now we’re finally moving forward

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you and there is a grief wail building inside of you.
Through the earth, through your toes,
Your legs, your belly, your chest and lungs,
The reach of your arms, your curled fists.
Your neck
Your jaw
Your face
The top of your head.

Have you ever seen a building implode?
Yes. This is you.
Now you know you have begun the work of healing.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you and there is a grief wail building inside of you and you crumbling.
The ground shakes as her own broken pieces slide rough against each other.
There is a red earth landslide and everything is tumbling into the sea.
On the ocean, a wall of water rushes toward land.
Disaster cannot be prevented, only survived or not.
The earth knows well the pain of things that cannot be fixed.

Your pain cannot be fixed.
There is no shortcut through this.
This knowledge is the key to everything that will come next.
There is more to come.

Sometimes healing looks like falling apart.
Sometimes falling apart is the path to what can be built.
Sometimes, we go through the darkest nights and there is nobody but the moon to hear.
He always listens.
Now you listen.

There is not enough air in the room but you are breathing.
There is nobody here but you are held.
You have broken and the world is breaking and we will always rebuild.

Do you hear me, love?
We will always rebuild.

- Jeanette LeBlanc

Update re "Origins of Evolution and Religion"

A Personal Update

Hi,

I am currently working up the next phase to humanity's origins and religions. The new title may be "Evolution of Civilizations" or some such.

Be patient. I am simply catching up with other topics before proceeding further.

Articles forthcoming will look at late mesolithic and early neolithic civilizations and their beliefs.

This will then transition to the major Mesopotamian civilizations and religions forming the background and context for Israel's civilization and religion.

To conclude, I would like to view Israel's polytheism with its later developing monotheism. It's quite evident in the Psalms, for instance, when knowing Yahweh's background as a Semeitc "god of storm".

Thus, we will examine into the developing Hebraic tradition behind the various names of God such as Yahweh, Adonai, and El Shaddai (many gods).

For those of you who haven't done so already, go to the Index - Evolution of Man & Religion to catch up across the past six weeks of work (basically the first thirty articles).

One last, my wife and I are taking a two week spring break ahead of a scheduled infectious foot surgery... something I've been dealing with since my hospital stay gone-wrong in 2016. It's been hellishly brutal and the dee[ infection will not go away without amputation. Hence another clean out and another span of weeks or months to heal again.

This is probably my eighth surgery on my foot and ankle. The first being the worst pain-wise; the second prevented me from dying due to full body sepsis; and all my later follow ups have addressed infectious abscesses as they come up every six-twelve months. So it's serious but something I am living with as non-disruptively as possible....

In summary, I will be using this week to draft-up future articles and hopefully not slow down when returning back home - and a week later, back to surgery one more time.

So prayers and patience for a bit. There's enough here on this website to keep one's attention and I've written everything so the content can be utilized in the classroom, conversation circles, and the church across a number of subjects.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
April 1, 2023

R.E. Slater - A Long Journey Ended

Last night I was reading past articles on quantum physics I had written nine years ago and sharing several insights with my wife on how quantum physics tied into process philosophy which all then connected neatly with "open and relational (process) theology" as a three legged triangle. But after posting an article on eco-cosmopolitics that same day, I just then realized I had to add a fourth leg to the triangle and expand it dimensionally when adding the cosmopolitical element of a pluri-universe dispensed in multi-natural, multi-perspectival, and multi-human terms of thrival. Throughout this rhombian structure you then get an open future with infinite possibilities allowing for agency, creativity, imagination, value, and joy. - re slater

Today is a Day of Days

Yesterday, quite unknowingly, I completed what was a milestone in my writings but didn't feel anything like it. I hadn't realized I had crossed a rubicon of sorts until reading through a few past articles on quantum physics later that evening (see one of the articles here) when it came to me that the physics of the small from nine years ago was matching up with the theology of the future written since.

I started out a decade ago (quite unwillingly) to update the theology I grew up with and knew well. It was very mainline, very evangelical, very reformed (and conservatively so) in doctrine. What I wanted back then was a contemporary theology which could better express my Christianity to myself, my kids, and several others struggling with issues of freewill, the kind of creation we live in, its future, and the church's place in the world.

At that time the cracks were beginning to appear in my locked-down, very "biblical" system of God, the bible, and the dispensational/covenant reformed doctrine I had rigorously been taught. But what all this learning needed was a complete smashing and rebuild. If my present house is any kind of example of my mindset then this is what I did to the theology I had learned from so many good people, mentors, and trusted confidantes. With our present house, I completed demolished it; lifted up its skeleton 20 ft into the air; bulldozed out its old, rotted, wooden foundation; placed a completely new cement foundation with additions underneath it; set it back down on the ground garage-and-all; and then rebuilt what was left of the old house from the ground up.

Apparently, over these many years, I have been doing this same thing with my mainline theology. With the Lord's help, and by the Spirit's guidance, I began in a very dark place. A deep personal wilderness of spiritual blackness where the Lord hid me to help open my eyes to see anew. Not "by throwing out the baby with the bath water" as they say, but by keeping the necessary structures required but not its rotting foundations. To then raise all up, demolish it, set it down, reframe it, skin it out, and create a renewing habitation built for the 21st century's postmodern era.

An era of constructive postmodernism measured by doctrine and topic, critique and reflection, upon all the anathema subjects my faith couldn't speak to as long as I lived within its older theological house (or is it it's older theological temple? I don't know. You decide).

A Long Wandering Ended

Anyway, as of last night, I realized an important watershed moment had been achieved. Yesterday I had just completed describing a very important visionary article on what a Post-Capitalistic, Whiteheadian-based, Cosmopolitic Ecological Civilization and Society would look like if implemented. Exhausted after writing all day, and after a week of putting together related articles to this topic, I began reading through quantum mechanics as a refresher to a final piece on our evolutionary cosmology I wanted to write before heading into the topic of  Black Theology.

At that moment it came to me that when I put the themes of quantum physics together with an open and relational faith I had both the big and the small of an open, undecided future. One that is unpredictable except that it is built upon God's Self, in His Image, as it were. Like my house, I built it from my head and my heart. Upon my character as it were. There were no plans. No blueprints. No outside architect. That all came later to match my vision. It was an open build from the ground up.

So too with God and His creation. It is being built in real-time utilizing creational (freewill) agency, a chaotic and random process, and a no-design future except that it would be loving, generative, and novel against all the obstacles which would attempt to defeat its path.

Now for the good stuff.... It was then I realized that I could add process philosophy to the mix of quantum physics and open and relation theology (which, by the way, is a natural outcome of process philosophy). Here, chaotic, random processes ranged wild and free. There are no certain outcomes but every possible outcome. There are no singlar lines of endeavor but every possible endeavor. It's state of being was, and is, ever-and-always in the process of becoming. Of prehending the past and increasing its concrescing being by one in a continually bubbling pluri-verse of becoming. Aaaah, this felt like the hand of God to me from the small to the large....

A sculpted mobius strip

Lastly...

I then noticed there was this nice, neat, cosmic, triangular state between quantum physics, open and relational theology, and process theology, which we may now describe as an open and relational process theology. All laid out in a contemporary version of constructive postmodernism.

To this triangular arrangement of 3, very sublime, very foundational themes, I could now add a distorted rhombian figure of 4 points laid out like a mobius strip in a never-ending 1-dimensional form connecting that aspect of creation which bends and wraps in-and-upon itself in infinite arrangement. An intricate structure limited only by time and imagination. It was what I had been working on all these many years of writing and editing. Of an ecological economy moving into a post-capitalist phase utilizing process-based Whiteheadian thinking on which to build an ecological civilization through localized effort. To be successful it would have to focus on the world of the small as well as the world of the large. The micro- with the macro-. The many with the one, and the one with the many.

Again, very quantum-like, very process-like, very open-future-like, where no blueprint or plan could adequately imagine final outcomes. It all would be built chaotically, randomly, without any pre-planning, by many hands and many communities and many nations. Each contributing as they could. The main points though would be constructed along the lines of humanitarian social justice (Christian Humanism) and ecological justice where nature has no human voice but our own human voices and actions. It's construction would be generative, novel, bringing wellbeing, and hopefully peace to an angry world learned only in speeches, and actions, of death and not life.

Conclusion

So I can effectively say this website has achieved its primary purpose of giving voice to those of us held silent for too long in past private temples of darkness and doom. Where God was said to love man but promised judgment and hell for many. Where the church's mission was to save the living as it could before this old world was cast into everlasting fires of torment. Where sinful act spoke louder than loving good works. Where the human spirit was so sinful it could never shine in the glimmer of God's image built into it. Where Christ came only to save mankind but not the earth we are destroying.

Aye, let us begin again with a more holistic contemporary theology. One built for the 21st Century. One which builds upon the atoning work of Christ whose redemptive fellowship restores God's image more fully without the chaining binds of sin's power subtending over it. By seeing a humanity utilizing God's gifts which it was birthed with for the freedom and liberation of others and for the restoration of this earth. That everlasting love and hope are part of our human constitution and not simply corrective theologic formulas uttered so strictly as you can't breath, or hope, and do anything without feeling guilty for everything you do.

Nay, God is bigger than us, our bible, or our doctrines and creeds. And it is my hope here at Relevancy22 we have begun a discussion which will join the voices of many others whom I have discovered along my wayward "liberal" journey through the wilderness of unknowing and uncertainty. That with proper Spirit-placed doubt - and the internal struggle God has placed within each our breasts - we discover His leading unto higher heights against the lower depths we see crashing around us. With God there is real hope. Real salvation. Real vision. Let us dream in our beings by becoming dream-makers in our world's of becoming.

Chapter 1 of discovery and renewal has ended for me. The foundations are laid. The house is built. Chapter 2 now begins stitching together all previous journeys into future endeavors of building together a new world of endless generative possibility. Amen and Amen.

R.E. Slater

August 12, 2020

Related Topics to Today's Discussion

The Contours of a Post-Capitalistic, Whiteheadian-based,

Cosmopolitic Ecological Civilization and Society

Indexes

Index - EarthCare and Ecology

Index - Process Philosophy & Theology

Theism and Process Theology

Index - Open & Relational Process Theology

Theism and Relational Theology

Theism and Open Theology

Index- Calvinism v. Arminianism

Postmodernism - Rethinking Church and Theology

Science and Evolution - General Topics

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

INDEX - PARTICLE PHYSICS, QUANTUM SCIENCE, AND THE UNIVERSE

QUANTUM PHYSICS, INDETERMINACY and MULTIVERSES

(res) The Quantum Universe We Live In

(res) The Laniakea Supercluster: Our Home in the Heavenly Skies

(bg) What Inflationary Theory Can Tell Us

(res) Discussions in Science and Religion - Week 2: A Tale of Two Cities

(res) Stephen Hawking: The Strangeness of Quantum Physics and Cosmic Indeterminacy

(res) Stephen Hawking, Indeterminacy, God & Quantum Physics

(res) Stephen Hawking, Multi-Universes, and God's Grander Design

(res) Allowing Indeterminancy and Randomness in God's Creation

(res) Process Theology - "Divine Action, Indeterminancy, and Dipolarism"

John Polkinghorne: How Do We Explain the Incredible Uniqueness of Our Form of Multiverse?

Alan Guth on Inflationary Cosmology

(res) Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design of God and the Cosmos

Thinking about God Makes Me Just Want to Keep My Mouth Shut

Building a Eco-World of Solidarity with God, Others, and Nature

Relevancy22 - Disclaimer, Purpose, Intention, and Goal

DISCLAIMER:

Relevancy22 is a collection of Contemporary, Postmodern, Critical Theology discussions built as a reference site and not as a personal blog. To make it interesting I try to interact with the material as I have time. Its contents and topics have been constructed to help users think through a vast array of contemporary issues. Using its Indexes on the right hand column will help any explorer begin acquiring the rudimentary knowledge gained from past contemporary and historical discussions required of the Christian faith in this post-truth age of rigorous belief juxtapositioned against known academic truths and post-conservative questions. It is this latter I wish to explore.

Relevancy22 does not purport to be a conservative "safe" site but one asking relevant questions to today's postmodern global cultures especially in light of who God is, what the bible is, and how the church thinks through these issues. The author, me, came to Jesus many, many years ago as a child and grew up in a fundamental church, and later, attended conservative-evangelical churches, all of which I have dearly loved. About a decade ago (2009) the Lord brought all my education, seminary training, and past ministries into re-calibration as I watched the church provide less and less relevant answers to its congregants and society. As such, I respect the past for the beauty it held but must now differ from its conclusions which I've been re-adjusting and updating over the years towards a more contemporary voice. I try to be gracious in my writing or reporting but at times do become passionate about a subject or topic as you will discover.

Relevancy22 was Holy-Spirit-borne for Christians seeking legitimate answers (or helpful directions) to their faith. In a way, I believe Relevancy22 to be recapturing the Orthodox Christian faith from the constructed one being voiced about by today's conservative churches which draw too heavily on their doctrinal commitments and not enough on an open (rather than closed) bible unfettered by traditional teachings. If the articles found within sound different, radical, or not quite conservative, they are. They've been written - or edited from other author's bodies of work - to cause us to think about difficult biblical subjects which have been overly simplified resulting in more fictional narratives of the church's faith than what they really are. In my mind, making the Christian faith "safe" from academic, scientific, and cultural examination is the beginning of all the evils of popular religions refusing to submit to, or enact, God's grace and mercy, peace and forgiveness, into the lives of both the lost and saved. Thus this online dialogue here. We need another gospel which embraces the fullness of God and His salvation through Christ our Savior.

As always, may God's peace and love flood the hearts and minds of readers everywhere.

Your brother in Christ,

R.E. Slater
August 3, 2017

R.E. Slater - Personal Thoughts and Ramblings

As you have guessed I've backed away from blogging for awhile to create a new space for myself after having experienced a truly terrible year of misery and pain gained from a complicated surgery last January 2016 which brought about three different infections - one of which was deadly serious - while the other two hindered the massive wounds gained from surgery from healing. After three surgeries (the latest one several days before this past Christmas) and a fourth hospitalization to keep me from dying (last April) I can say that this experience has been one that has broken all my normal routines in life - both at the blogsite and out in my communities where I volunteer in environmental reclamation with various green and blue (water) organizations and manage various political commissions and appointments in local government.

However, this has also been a good time to break away from my past labours at distilling what a progressive Jesus-gospel and biblical-tradition might look like to reflect on other literary and scientific interests. Which I have done in reading through the entire New Testament in eight short weeks with a group of 30 other readers using Biblica's unusual bible containing no verses or chapter headings and mixing up the books according to authorship; reading/studying Vergil's massive 14,000 lined poem, The Aeneid, wherein he created a new narrative legacy for the old Roman Republic under Augustus Octavius Caesar; Shakespeare's marvelously rich and dark, Hamlet. I've gone to class and studied Monetary Supply Economics (basically America's banking system); the Role and history of the European Union (whose lectures were conducted by a former US Ambassador); and looked (again) at the necessary disruption and resolution caused by America's Civil War for the Constitution Rights of All (I read 4 thick books, went to a class on Michigan's regiments in the war, and also visited Gettysburg for the first time this past August). This past summer my wife and I toured Washington D.C. for a week absorbing its museums, history, and culture (despite, or in respite to my ill health); and generally toured the state of Virginia from Shenandoah Park to Richmond, Virginia, to its Eastern Seaboard including the Eastern Shoreline and the state of Maryland which included a visit to Anapolis' Naval Academy.

During all this time I have been collecting books, videos, and lectures to review on topics like postmodernism and where it is and might be going.... My personal thoughts are that its "good" period of "global cooperation and unity" is now being crudely replaced by a "post-postmodernism period" of state control and authoritarianism, chaos, and anarchy by populist movements both left and right of the political spectrum. Mostly because humanity doesn't do solidarity very well with each other wishing to have it all their way or none at all. But I'm pretty sure the bible calls this sin. At least that was my reflecting thought to our goodhearted (though very conservative) ambassador who shared the same opine in the turn of the phrase, "We just don't share together very well."

I have also started (several times by now due to the normal flow of life's constant interruptions) to read at a deeper level what Continental Philosophy might promise Christianity as a more proper philosophical bedrock than what analytic Western Philosophy can do with all its syllogistic formulas and mathematical arcane re life rules, do's, and don'ts, and binary reflections. To this I'm trying to read through Martin Heidegger's thoughts on metaphysics, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this, and the progress of CP by way of Radical Theology using Relational and Process Theology to help it behave. Mostly I think Christian hermeneutics might be greatly helped in its narrative appeal and messaging should both public and church come to understand that all of God and His ways are in flux and in movement about us. That His Spirit is more unbound to us than ever before in this time of theologic hisotry. That it was never just one thing. Which is to say, God is intimately present with us at all times. Who cares for us in the totality of the desperateness of our human condition fraught with uncommon freedom to be all that we are - both the good and the bad. And, as respecting this freedom, our Lord and Savior works within, underneath, and across these paradigms of creation's magnanimous freedom in Sovereignly ways of encouraging us, urging us forward in "pleadings and prayers" by His Holy Spirit, and throughout the miraculously transformative life we partake in with its promises of great beauty and deep abysses of great harm.

And it is this kind of theology I believe can be transformative (as I related in my last article re the subject of biblical interpretation respecting inerrancy). That God has not abandoned us but works within the spirit-system of the universe doing all that He can underneath its great burdens without losing an iota of His majesty or Godship by partnering with creation towards rebirth and renewal, redemption and resurrection, reclamation, service, beauty, and love.

Peace.

R.E. Slater

January 14, 2017

A Short History of Relevancy22: The Reason for Its Creation

I am reminded again of God's wonder and grace and of the difficulty the church has in grasping these deep truths of God's nature and message as I watch and listen to the 2015-2016 American presidential elections play out across the media soundstages. My heart truly aches to hear the orcish, rascist division rising from the pulpits of these "self-proclaimed leaders" of the United States denouncing the rights and liberties granted each American citizen under the United States Constitution and its first 10 Amendments knows as the Bill of Rights as many of these candidates speak of walls, wars, division, and economic ruin.

But it is not simply the speakers of these words that amaze me but the ready acceptance of the American evangelical church and its fellowships which so readily accept so many unwise and ungracious words. To me, it is the church that stands at fault for not discerning the harm these politicians do to unbinding the many decades of hurt and destruction America has endured or shown to others, whether domestic or internationally. The postmodern 21st century should have learned by now that if we wish to be different from the history of the past that watchwords like "love, togetherness, coalitions, cooperation, listening, respect, thoughtfulness" should be readily on our lips, hearts, hands, and feet. If not, we are doomed to repeat the ills and harms of the past (and probably worse) which have been amply demonstrated by the many brigand bands of thugs, oppressors, and madmen, so far these first several years since the start of the millennium.

About five years ago I began writing of the changes going on within the secularized, modern evangelical church and during this time decided to create a blog site named Relevancy22 designating it as a place where I might critique both my self and the (fundamental or conservative) evangelical doctrines I had learned and held so dearly to me. In essence, I wished to help today's evangelical church to distinguish its movement away from the orthodox gospel of Christ. To do this I used feedback from evangelical organizations associated with the magazine "Christianity Today" listening to their attitudes and interpretations of the bible to provide to me apt examples of what Christianity should not be doing in messaging the gospel of Christ to the world's many cultural movements. And yet, sadly, this year's political results have shown the truth I and others had feared were occurring long years ago as poll after poll rolled out showing that evangelicalism's spirit of grace and mercy had subtly changed to one seeking political power and right (otherwise known as dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism).

After six months of critiquing my background and bringing my (yesteryear's) seminary education up-to-date from some 25 years ago (one which had been shelved while conducting ministries both within the church and community, raising a family, and building a consulting and technology business), I decided to changed my task to one of crafting from criticizing the church to a more positive message of what a progressive, postmodern church might look like. Why? Mostly because I could not find that needful prophetic voice in my evangelical community, nor among my local contacts. At the time it felt very absent and for me, personally, an extremely lonely time of being cut off from a progressive kindred fellowship (which now, looking back, was kinda there though well hidden and inaccessible).

So as I wrote, my purpose became one of trying to positively influence the evangelical doctrines I grew up with. And as I did I knew I would have to go beyond my fellowship's boundary lands by removing unbiblical dogmas and folklores (as example, those more commonly-held doctrines by the Reformed church which are held as biblically sanctioned - when in fact they are not). Instead, those church teachings had become shibboleths for evangelics to identify one another by (sic, labels we would self-righteously use to ironically warn brethren of "unbiblical" doctrine ahead and so, not listen to the prophetic voices God had raised up to cry in their own wildernesses of pain and passion. And yet, this latter result became a grave mistake in consequence for the evangelical church).

As such, this next effort took another three more dedicated years of 1) re-engaging with science in its various streams; 2) discerning conflicts and disconnects between religion and faith; 3) distinguishing the differing movements of process theology of which subset I chose the open and relational tone as its vernacular; 4) of replacing systematic studies of God with a more open and fluid narratival approach to the Indescribable One; and, most importantly, 5) examining what a new biblical hermeneutic must have in its DNA vs the popular literal (flat) reading-and-interpretation of the bible and Christ's gospel. I did this exhaustively - but not definitely - so that others may pick up these streams of thought and further my - and many other's - efforts, as they were able or interested to do so in their respective circumstances, disciplines, or personal passions.

My final effort was to 6) recreate a philosophical foundation for a progressive, postmodern, post-secular, post-Christian Orthodoxy utilizing elements of Continental Philosophy (as versus Western Analytical thought) and Radical Theology (which I learned is a much more philosophical discipline than it is a theological one). Unfortunately, this material is vast and deep, and will take more than a few years to sort out even as its own disciplines are evolving from script-to-script across a plethora of authors, thinkers, and ideologs.

However, the heart of my endeavor was to lift Jesus up, using Him as the interpretive center of the bible (both in the OT and NT) while sharing His love and service to humanity as our luminary guidepost to Spirit-filled empowerment of our Almighty God's missional gospel. To center all postmodern orthodoxy (teaching) on postmodern orthopraxy (living, doing) - meaning that, we hold a culturally relevant faith connected to the classical past but a living faith that is dynamic and open. One charged with strength in weakness by putting faith into practice. How? By exercising faith's works of serving, sacrificing, and loving all people whomever they are, wherever they are, and whatever they are doing. Knowing that God's church is culled from the remnants of humanity. Not from the self-proclaimed institutionalized church of bricks-and-mortar which seek power and influence on this earth, but from the unseen and hidden living church of God. And that we should never deny God's plain work regardless its source and blessing. Nor His wonders and grace. But to embrace all as brethren and sisters who stand against even our friends and family who might wave another allegiance than to Christ alone.

Peace and blessings,

R.E. Slater

March 18, 2016

*My apologies for my absence these several months but I have been gravely ill and am still struggling to recover to health. In addition, I had become overly active two years ago across local, country, regional, and state government lines working on all things related to land, water, open spaces, air, energy, and food. My chief antigonist has been an infection that came about through a massively invasive prosthetic surgery to correct a growing debilitation which I had been enduring for years. As consequence, I am now dealing with the pain and trouble this stubborn infection is causing me which has greatly disrupted my routines and responsibilities.