Quotes & Sayings


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

(Metamodern) Process Radical Theology v Secular/Humanistic Radical Theology


 

(Metamodern) Process Radical Theology
v. Secular/Humanistic Radical Theology


I may develop this topic a bit more in the days ahead. For now I'd like to begin here with these thoughts and in separate posts review (and possibly add to) the links I've listed below along with visuals and perhaps a video or two.


Examining the Past... Dogmatic Religion Was Not For Me

I began my journey away from a secularized form of evangelical theology probably in my 30s and began writing of a new way of doing Christianity less than a dozen years ago. It came when joining an emergent Christian church which is simply an assembly of evangelical Christians more focused on loving ministries to those around themselves than on traditional ministries focused on dogma over people.

I was raised in the religiously stricter traditions of Christian fundamentalism and conservative Evangelicalism which had outreach ministries for the purposes of helps and indoctrination. Whereas the emergent church I joined many years later carried many of its evangelical beliefs with it but was less interested in indoctrination and more interested in serving others irrespective of standardized tests of church dogma.

Later, my past fellowships generally became stricter over the years in their outlooks towards society - not only condemning sin and evil but building higher gates and walls around itself as theocratic islands of refuge for traditional orthodox Christianity protecting itself from ubiquitous sins and evils. These latter movements of worldly fear and the desire to control the uncontrollable fed upon itself paradoxically creating in its wake a more "secularized" church mindset of "them vs us" rather than a loving mindset to those outside it's approved bastions of faith.

Quickly, church-approved Christian colleges and secondary educational schools rose up; political "woke-ness" became a thing; socio-political tests for the "right kind of Christian beliefs" settled within the hallowed halls of evangelical Christianity; and ministries to society fell by the wayside as Christian White Supremacy and Trumpian National Populism took over as the new gospel of Jesus. Where churches once reached out to the homeless, the sick, the unwanted and overlooked, they now had fallen into the politics and secularization of the day where compassion comes last and self-survival of religious purity comes first.

Which meant that while all this was going on I had the good fortune to begin attending an emergent church which followed Jesus' commands to love over all the things which can get in the way of following Jesus. It also showed to me how my earlier fellowships had wandered away from their first love and had gotten lost in the weeds of i) Christian protectionism; ii) Church religious rule and dominionism over America's Constitutional civil democratic laws for all; iii) Sloganeering for the defense of a righteous and legalistic Christian faith; and, iv) Defining Christianity in terms of political party distinguishing whether you were a godless "liberal" democrat or a true believing, home-schooling, critical-racism rejecting, "trumpian" republican.


Leaving My Past Behind... Becoming a "Done" but not a "None"

Hence, in these matters, I don't believe I left my former faith as my former faith had left me.... As I aged and learned to read and interact with people and society beyond my church groups I became aware of a type of Christian faith I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with... one which would demand of me a "Berean" kind of re-examination regarding my Christian faith's pros and cons....

I began by deconstructing my faith under the assumed blogger name of "Skinhead" denouncing and burning up all the chaff I held in my ungod-like faith and the fellowships I clung to. Beginning with Jerry Falwell and the Kingdom ministries of tele-evangelism; the spread of proper "bible" colleges and home schooling programs one must attend in order to have a "godly" biblical education; and the many socially approved attendances, thoughts, ideas, and behaviors to observe to maintain a "Christian" faith. I felt a deep sense of relief when letting go - if not a refreshing spiritual weight lifting off my soul when abandoning the mere act of judging others, or learning to see people as people rather than as "they should be." In God's world there is a beautiful, complex array of difference-and-movement amongst humanity as there is in nature. Learning to see it for what it was became the best gift the Lord could have given me when rethinking what a faith in a loving God meant. It meant a deeply vibrant restoration, if not redemption, from a faith caught up in the wrong things.

After six months of deconstructing my faith this activity gave way to rebuilding... or re-constructing... my Christian faith which eventually gave way to a variety of permutations from my past Baptist traditions (GARB/ABWE). Generally, I kept what I could of my past biblical training and earlier fellowships while renouncing all forms of biblicism, Calvinism, and judgmentalism and began a long return to my Baptist roots of historic Arminianism which I quickly updated into Open and Relational Process Theologies of uncontrolling divine love, indeterminant freewill agency, and culturally progressive attitudes willing to re-educate its faith and faith practices.

As example, when reading the bible, it helped to read it literarily rather than literally. That is, to read the bible with attention to it's grammatical, historical, and contextual study of ancient cultures. But not "inerrantly" when applying a literalistic study of the bible's passages as is being taught by evangelically-minded churches, schools, and colleges. A literal exegesis --> exposition --> eisigesis but warrants unloving religious cultural norms more willing to uplift "holiness" over "loving" one another.

Too, the first six to eight years of my postings here at Relevancy22 speak to the disquiet my soul was undergoing in it's journey through so many defeating situations. In them I began the difficult labor of creating a new theological foundation for Christianity of every flavor and denominational belief. This consisted in several objectives:

1 - To be willing to unlearn in order to relearn.

2 - To utilize doubt and uncertainty as better measures of writing a theology than thinking there could only be but one way of doing this task.

3 - To remove the Westernization of the bible (sic, Greek Hellenism et al) for a more organic and comprehensive metaphysic which I found in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Theology (ala John Cobb and company) as a better foundation to write of God, faith, and creation.

4 - And lastly, to expand this Process Thought into every area of science, belief, and academic by interweaving and integrating all areas towards an organic, relational theology and cosmogeny fraught in cooperative vs. competing partnerships, brokenness, and regeneration.

5 - This took some years to do and is where I am today but my faith journey's overall effort was to re-sync the Christian faith so that Jesus and God's love came together and became the new center of my Christian faith and theology.

When doing so I wished to rebalance the books on the Person and Work of God... to re-right Christian doctrines and dogmas towards a God who loves always. When doing so I can now more easily speak to both church and world whether on the bible, faith, practice, science, politics, economy, eco-civilizations, environmentalism, and so on. My earlier church doctrines and beliefs could not speak so eloquently nor so easily as I can now. But a theology whose center is Love and whose foundation is processual makes all the difference.

And so, I have learned to talk about my faith again from a far more positive and expanded (doctrinal) foundation than the crumbling, dying one I had left behind. My many years of lay ministry, teaching, pastoring, evangelizing, and outreach ministries, besides that of a Bible College B.A. and a three year M.Div. seminary training, helped towards this complex process as much as it hindered it....

But the Lord gifted me with the ability and passion to write my journey down, which I did, with a lot of help by the Lord's Spirit in discerning the many "spirits" blinding me to the pathways I needed to be trekking. Both church and world "spirits" which misdirected and confused the real problems at hand; attitudes and beliefs which attempted too many times to lead away from the Jesus I needed to see the more clearly over the dross and chaff lying everywhere about my heart, head and soul.


Two kinds of Radical Theology... One with Jesus, the Other Without Jesus

I say all of this to introduce a new Process-Relational version of Radical Theology as versus the more common agnostic forms of Radical (Humanistic) Theology. They each use the same moniker "radical theology" but they each go in their separate directions having first met on the common ground of personal, familial, community, and societal deconstruction and reconstruction.

Radical theology as a discipline, first began with the "death of God" rubric under the pen of J.J. Altizer which frankly, was a legitimate assessment before, during and after World War II. It is certainly a subject which I should write more about as we so often travel the hard roads of life which ruin us, tear us apart, and make us so very angry.

For many, many reasons we each experience the loss of faith - or, the death of God - in our lives. And for many other reasons we may sometimes be able to get past the deadness in our souls of God's failure to help when we needed it most.

But when I think of God's existential death due to harmful phenomenological human experiences it doesn't mean God has died but that this God has died for me in my heart and soul. The things we cherish were removed from us and cannot be gotten back. This loss has left real anger or sadness or hurts which God could not protect us from. In this way God has died like a dear friendship lost to us forever.

But the process-version of radical theology always comes back to the God who loves us and asks "Why?" It may never get answers. It may only get the barren landscapes of learning to live with loss. And yet, God is there healing and helping as possible. We live in a God-created world but not one devoid of sin nor evil. It has its beauties and satisfactions but it also has hardship and hurt. A theology of Love says that God is always with us, loving us but with a freewill creation comes indeterminant joys and sadness God cannot protect us from but can help us perhaps survive and get through with a measure of joy and assurance where none should be expected.

But the secular-version of radical theology speaks to a God who isn't God but only a "symbolic signifier" of our religious psycho-social identity. An identity bound up in resulting socio-religious mores, beliefs, attitudes, and deeds. which finally says, "Yes, God is dead. God never was, and it was I which held on to this misplaced belief."

Now perhaps for some radical theologians writing of our common psycho-social identity known in their parlance as a religious or iconic signifier of a symbolic God who isn't but is upheld by our social circles of family and church... perhaps for some radical theologians this "God who isn't" is but the beginning of their own journey (as well as their readers) towards discovering the "God who is"... who may become their own divine Signifier.... And yet, for many who are utilizing this kind of philosophic radical theology God is simply a descriptive label filled with personal content and not supernatural reality.

Which is why I think of radical theology in two forms - one which keeps God and rethinks its faith; and one which shelves God for a secularistic treatise of religion. I found the same thing to be true when taking a class with Alain Badiou a few years back when discussing the topic of "Being and Event." Except for his philosophic outcome it was the same as the gospel of Jesus but without Jesus. It perfectly explained the processes between being and event. So too with radical theologians. They can perfectly speak to their subject but in the end God becomes signifier rather than Signifier. I chose the latter while not neglecting to be conversant with the former as time and studies allow.


Conclusion

For myself, like many process theologians, when we speaking to radical theology we are also using the language of deconstruction and reconstruction but this language is never without the Creator God of Redemption as a real, divine Personage and Being. And when rebuilding the Christian faith we will always return to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in newer-and-fuller valuative meanings towards the many processual forms that divine atoning redemption and generative healing may take. (Christian) Radical theology used in this religious sense retains God, and looks to God, for salvation in the many ways which divine salvation may take.

And so, for every Peter Rollins out there, there will be his counterpart of Rob Bell re divine angst and reunion. For every Maria Francesca French (nee Grassi?) there will always be a Grace-Ji-Sun Kim re intersectional feminism and liberation theology. For every Jack Caputo there will be a John Cobb (a Whiteheadian process theologian) re divine absence and presence.

Each of these names are dear to me and their work important to read, know and understand. But each speaks to the radicalness of divine presence using their own philosophical-theological backgrounds even as they each, like all metaphysical travellers, are exploring life's alternatives to personal identity and faith by their own separate routes of examination.

My paths, as they have presently taken me, will continue along the lines of expanding process faith studies, worship, and bible exposition using the Christian faith's own hoary commentaries and long histories of words and deeds when examining what Christians have done right, and what they have done wrong, and might do better with a more loving version of their theologies.

Come join me and let's journey this faith-process together...

And finally, with Pope Francis, the best radical theology I can think of is by placing the love of God at the center of my faith and not the dogmas of the church at faith's altar. "Where rules mislead, grace prevails."

Amen and Amen,

R.E. Slater
February 8, 2023
edited, Feb 9-10, 2023




ChatBot and I Discuss Radical Theology

ME:

Hi Chatbot

CB:

Hello! How can I help you today?

ME:

Compare the radical theologies of Peter Rollins, Jack Caputo, and Maria Francesca French.

CB:

Peter Rollins, John Caputo, and María Francesca Grassi are all prominent thinkers within the field of radical theology, a branch of theology that seeks to challenge and subvert traditional religious beliefs and practices.

Peter Rollins is a Northern Irish philosopher and theologian who is best known for his work on the idea of "apophatic theology," which emphasizes the limits of language and reason in expressing the nature of God. He is also known for his critiques of traditional forms of Christianity and his emphasis on the importance of doubt and questioning in the spiritual life.

John Caputo is an American philosopher and theologian who is best known for his work on postmodern theology and the philosophy of religion. He is particularly known for his critiques of traditional forms of Christianity and his emphasis on the importance of "weakness" and "vulnerability" in religious thought.

María Francesca Grassi is an Argentine philosopher and theologian who is known for her work on feminist and liberation theologies. She is particularly interested in the ways in which traditional forms of Christianity have been used to oppress marginalized communities and is committed to promoting a more inclusive and equitable form of religious thought.

In summary, each of these thinkers offers a unique perspective on the nature of theology and religion and challenges traditional forms of Christianity. While they share a commitment to subverting established beliefs and practices, their specific critiques and perspectives differ significantly.

ME:

Each [radical theologian/philosopher] critiques Christianity for its lack of humanity towards others; it's devotion for [religious] rules over loving one's neighbor; and [the church's seeming] desire to oppress all those who disagree with traditional Christianity. Can one say that radical theology is a form of removing loveless religion from Christianity's secularization faith?

CB:

Yes, one could argue that radical theology can be seen as a form of removing loveless religion from Christianity by critiquing the ways in which traditional forms of Christianity have been used to oppress marginalized communities and promote inequality.

Radical theologians like Peter Rollins, John Caputo, and María Francesca Grassi are often critical of the prioritization of doctrine over compassion and the lack of concern for the well-being of others in traditional forms of Christianity. They argue that this type of religion, which they see as "loveless," needs to be transformed or rejected in favor of a more humane and compassionate form of faith.

In this sense, radical theology can be seen as a response to the secularization of religion, which is often characterized by the decline of traditional religious beliefs and practices and the increasing influence of secular values and ideals.

By challenging the dominant forms of Christianity and promoting a more loving and inclusive faith, radical theologians aim to reclaim the religious impulse from secularization and to reorient Christianity towards a more humanistic and compassionate path.

ME:

Whitehead's Process philosophy as basis for process theology ala John Cobb, Thomas Oord, Tripp Fuller, etc, also offers the same critique of Christianity as its non-processual counterpart of radical theology. Between the two, which is more theistic in orientation (as versus institutionalized criticism)?

CB:

Whitehead's process philosophy and process theology both offer critiques of traditional forms of Christianity and emphasize the importance of process and change in religious thought. However, process theology, as embodied in the work of John Cobb, Thomas Oord, Tripp Fuller, and others, is generally considered to be more theistic in orientation, as it seeks to affirm the existence and ongoing activity of God within the world and human experience.

In contrast, radical theology, as represented by thinkers like Peter Rollins, John Caputo, and María Francesca Grassi, tends to take a more institutional critique of Christianity and focuses on the ways in which traditional forms of religion have been used to oppress marginalized communities and promote inequality. Radical theologians are often more skeptical of traditional beliefs about God and the supernatural, and their work can be seen as more critical and deconstructive in nature.

So, in terms of theism, process theology is generally considered to be more theistic in orientation, as it affirms the existence and activity of God within the world, while radical theology tends to take a more critical stance towards traditional beliefs about God and the supernatural.

ME:

Agreed. One is theistically oriented with outcomes of removing dogmas for humanitarian purpose while the other is more agnostic with similar outcomes of demystifying faith for fairer and equal freedoms of the individual.

CB:

Yes, that is a fair characterization. Process theology is theistically oriented and seeks to reinterpret traditional beliefs about God in a way that is more consistent with contemporary scientific and philosophical understandings, while also emphasizing the importance of compassion and social justice. Radical theology, on the other hand, is often more agnostic in orientation and critiques the ways in which traditional religious institutions and beliefs have been used to oppress marginalized communities and promote inequality. Both approaches aim to demystify traditional religious beliefs and practices and to promote a more humane and equitable form of faith.

ME:

Thx. All for now. G'night

CB:

You're welcome! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. Have a great night!"


REFERENCES TO READ



Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Empty Altars - American Saints in a Cynical Age

 

eYcmB0pp.jpg-large

Your Invite to Empty Altars - an Online class with Diana Butler Bass

 

I am beyond thrilled to announce Homebrewed Christianity's upcoming class this Lent, Empty Altars: American Saints in a Cynical Age. I will be joined by Church Historian, Public scholar of Religion, and friend, Diana Butler Bass. We are teaming for a mind-blowing, heart-expanding class this Lent — and our focus is history, spirituality, and social change. The course will begin on Monday, February 27 and run for the 6 weeks up to Easter. The class is donation based (including 0) and while you can join each session live, they are available afterward so you can go at your own pace.

 

Screen Shot 2023-01-23 at 10.08.17 AM

Tripp listening to Diana at Theology Beer Camp

Why Empty Altars? Why Now?

We live in iconoclastic times. All around us, saints and heroes are being knocked off or taken down from public altars. It seems that nearly everyone we once admired or held in esteem has failed us. We've stripped the altars of both state and church. America's spiritual landscape is now marked by empty altars everywhere.

Taking down statues is nothing new, especially in Christian history. Cynicism and anger at failed institutions and flawed heroes is nothing new. But human beings rarely leave altars empty very long -- there's almost a pressing need to re-sanctify the geographies we inhabit. People always put statues back up.

 

Dustin Kensrue-37

But of who? And to commemorate what? How do we move ahead with new saints and a less troublesome iconography? What "saints" can inspire us to address the hurts of our hearts, the brokenness of our communities, and the pressing issues of our times?

Shouldn't we just give up on the whole idea of saints anyway? Why bother?

Join us this Lent as we explore "sainthood" for an American -- and global -- future. We'll share stories that need to be told of "saints" you know and those you need to know in a quirky learning journey through American religious history.

 

Keep it Zesty,
Tripp Fuller

 




Welcome to the Post-Christian Century:
Diana Butler Bass & Bill Leonard in conversation

Homebrewed Christianity w/ Dr. Tripp Fuller
 Streamed live on Feb 1, 2023


Two Church Historians and Public Scholars of Religion
join Tripp Fuller for a conversation about the changing
shape of American religion.





 

50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies


50th Anniversary Conference of
the Center for Process Studies

A 3-day celebration of the 50-year legacy of CPS and its creative transformation in the context of a new generation of process thinkers


Date and time
Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 9:00 AM – Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:00 PM PST

Location
Claremont United Church of Christ
233 Harrison Avenue
Claremont, CA 91711

CONFERENCE VISION AND RATIONALE

Founded in 1973 by John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, The Center for Process Studies (CPS) is coming upon its 50-year anniversary as a faculty research center of Claremont School of Theology. Under the leadership of Cobb and Griffin, CPS earned a global reputation as the southern California hub for the study of process philosophy and theology. Through rigorous research, cutting-edge conferences, and academic publications, Cobb and Griffin enacted the mission of CPS to facilitate the development, relevance and application of Whitehead’s philosophy across disciplines. The continued leadership by subsequent co-directors Marjorie Suchocki (1990), Philip Clayton (2003), Roland Faber (2006), Monica Coleman (2008) and others, built upon the foundations of Cobb and Griffin and continued to lead CPS into new generations of research and relevance. Now led by executive director Wm. Andrew Schwartz (2013) and program director Andrew M. Davis (2020), CPS enters its 50th year indebted to the contributions of the past, but looking toward the novelty of the future.

Co-sponsored by The Cobb Institute, The Institute for Ecological Civilization, and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, the “50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies” celebrates the 50-year legacy of CPS and its creative transformation in the context of a new generation of process thinkers. Three core layers of investigation, each with four respective sessions (A-D), are proposed in light of this purpose:

1. Reenchanting Religion: Process Theology in the 21st Century (Feb 15th)

  • A. Divinity Reimagined: What is novel in the explication and/or reception of a process doctrine (or model) of God over and against its alternatives? Where are challenges and opportunities arising in current debates and conversations?
  • B. Religious Experience and Religious Belonging: What forms of religious experience, intuition and belonging are substantiated and/or produced from within process theology as creatively expressed across ecclesial settings? What does process theology/spirituality look like when lived out communally?
  • C. Panpsychism and Religious Naturalism: In what ways are process conceptions of panpsychism (or panexperientialism) relevant to the re-formulation of central Christian doctrines e.g., creation, Christology and divine action? What is the relationship between panpsychism and affirmations of religious naturalism?
  • D. Beyond Dialogue and Deep Religious Pluralism: Where are new connections being made between process theology and different religious systems and thinkers? In what ways is process theology informing new discussions of religious pluralism and multiplicity?

2. Science and Philosophy: Nature and the Nature of Reality (Feb 16th)

  • A. Facts, Values and Possibilities: How does process thought understand the relationship between facts, values and possibilities as variously expressed from physics to metaphysics? In what ways does process philosophy offer an interpretive metaphysics for the findings of physics?
  • B. New Materialism, Poststructuralism, and Process Philosophy: Where do points of connection lie between process philosophy, new materialism and poststructuralism? What new voices/insights are being integrated and what interdisciplinary insights are emerging?
  • C. Brains, Souls and Self: What new contributions is process thought making to related concerns and questions in neurology, psychology and psychiatry? Where have advances been made with respect to the brain, the mind-body problem, personal identity and the self, and personality growth and transformation?
  • D. Art, Beauty and Creativity: In what ways does process philosophy inform aesthetic experience, theory, and expression? Where are new developments and connections being made across artistic disciplines?

3. Process in Practice: Society, Sustainability and Ecological Civilization (Feb 17th)

  • A. Economies and Communities for the Common Good: In what ways is process thought informing and/or critiquing economic theories, policies and measures? What practical revisions are being proposed and where? To what end are these revisions sought and for which communities?
  • B. Power, Peace and Politics: What resources does process thought sustain in attempts to remedy deepening bifurcations across politics, society, and culture? What extremes does process thought seek to avoid in political theory, governance, and power? How is peace possible given the dysfunctional entanglement of power and politics?
  • C. Process Philosophy and Education: How is process philosophy informing and/or transforming educational theory and practice? Where do theoretical and practical weaknesses lie from grade-school to university settings and beyond? How is process philosophy responding to the crises in education?
  • D. Environmental Ethics and Ecological Civilization: What theoretical and practical ethical measures does process thought support and/or justify in light of the ecological crisis and the quest for an ecological civilization? What requires transformation in our relation to the environment and its human and non-human “others”?

It remains a truly exciting time for the global process movement with a new generation of scholars leading the way. This conference aims not only to celebrate the 50-year legacy of CPS, but also anticipate its continued relevance and creative transformation in the decades still ahead.



Alfred North Whitehead

About The Center for Process Studies

Our Mission

Driven by the principle of relationality and commitment to the common good, the Center for Process Studies (CPS) works on cutting edge discourse across disciplines to promote the exploration of interconnection, change, and intrinsic value as core features of our world.

As a faculty-based research center at Claremont School of Theology (CST), CPS conducts research and develops educational resources that explore the implications of these principles on a range of topics (e.g. science, ecology, culture, philosophy, religion, education, psychology, political theory, etc.) in a unique transdisciplinary style that harmonizes fragmented disciplinary thinking in order to develop integrated and holistic modes of understanding.

The CPS mission is carried out through academic conferences, courses, and seminars, a robust visiting scholars program, the world’s largest library related to process-relational writings, and an array of publications (including a peer-reviewed journal and a number of active books series).


Our History

The Center for Process Studies (CPS) is a faculty-based research center at Claremont School of Theology, in affiliation with Claremont Graduate University. The Center conducts research, publishes scholarly and popular works, organizes courses and conferences, and seeks to promote the common good for our common world by means of the relational approach found in process thought.

Influenced by the work of Alfred North Whitehead and John B. Cobb, Jr., CPS is dedicated to the expansive exploration of ever-new sectors of academia and society through the transformative and ever-transforming tradition of process thinking. Process thinkers engage many different religious traditions and non-religious worldviews, working to both create positive social change and protect the natural environment. Among the Center’s publications are: Process Studies, the leading refereed journal in the field; Process Perspectives, a popular newsmagazine; and multiple series of books and publications stemming from its various projects.

Founded in 1973 by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin as a faculty center of Claremont School of Theology in affiliation with Claremont Graduate University, the Center for Process Studies was established to facilitate the development and application of a relational worldview. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki became a co-director in 1990. Philip Clayton became a co-director in fall 2003. Roland Faber became a co-director in January 2006, and Monica A. Coleman became a co-director in fall 2008. In fall 2013, Wm Andrew Schwartz (a PhD student at the time) was appointed as Managing Director of CPS. In this capacity, he played a central role in organizing the 2000-person "Seizing Alternative" conference in June 2015. Upon completion of his PhD in fall 2016 Schwartz was appointed as Executive Director of CPS. As of summer of 2020, CPS is affiliated with Willamette University and located in Salem, OR.

Through seminars, conferences, publications, a library/archive, and visiting scholars program, the Center for Process Studies encourages research on the form of process thought which received its primary impetus from philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000).

CPS contributes to the development of a new cultural paradigm of systematic metaphysics influenced by a relational worldview. As a resource for scholars and professionals, CPS coordinates multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research on pressing issues while seeking to avoid the inertia and limitations of segregated university disciplines. Where other new paradigm institutes focus on singular issues—like ecology, agriculture, feminism, race and class, decentralized political economic theory, or appropriate technology—a typical process focus is to integrate these issues through a non-dualistic worldview applicable to a wide range of issues.

Deeply appreciative of the natural sciences, process philosophy uniquely integrates science, religion, ethics, and aesthetics. It portrays the cosmos as an organic whole analyzable into internally related processes. In this way process thought offers a postmodern alternative to the mechanistic model that still influences much scientific work and is presupposed in much humanistic literature. The relational process perspective deals with multicultural, feminist, ecological, inter-religious, political, philosophical, and economic issues. Process thought provides a basis for discussion between Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions. It offers an agenda on the social, political, and economic order that brings issues of human justice together with a concern for ecology. In these and other ways, process thinkers hope to contribute to those movements that will carry the world beyond war, injustice, and despair.


Saturday, February 4, 2023

What is a Language Model?



What Is a Language Model?

July 20, 2022


What are they used for? Where can you find them?
And what kind of information do they actually store?


Our aim at deepset is that everyone, no matter their level of technical background, can harness the power of modern natural language processing (NLP) and language models for their own use case. Haystack, our open-source framework, makes this a reality.

When we talk to our users, we encounter common sources of confusion about NLP and machine learning. Therefore, in the upcoming blog posts, we want to explain some basic NLP concepts in understandable language. First up: language models.


Language Models in NLP

Language models take center stage in NLP. But what is a language model? To answer that question, let’s first clarify the term model and its use in machine learning.

What is a machine learning model?

The real world is complex and confusing. Models serve to represent a particular field of interest — a domain — in simpler terms. For example, weather models are simplified representations of meteorological phenomena and their interactions. These models help us understand the weather domain better and make predictions about it.

In machine learning, models are much the same. They serve mainly to predict events based on past data, which is why they’re also known as forecasting or predictive models.

The data that we feed to an Machine Learning (ML) algorithm allows it to devise a model of the data’s domain. That data should represent reality most faithfully, so that the models which are based on it can approximate the real world as closely as possible.

What is a language model (LM)?

A language model is a machine learning model designed to represent the language domain. It can be used as a basis for a number of different language-based tasks, for instance:
and plenty of other tasks that operate on natural language.

In a domain like weather forecasting, it’s easy to see how past data helps a model to predict a future state. But how do you apply that to language? In order to understand how the concept of prediction factors into language modeling, let’s take a step back and talk about linguistic intuition.

Linguistic intuition

As the speaker of a language, you have assembled an astonishing amount of knowledge about it, much of which cannot be taught explicitly. It includes judgments about grammaticality (whether or not a sentence is syntactically correct), synonymity (whether two words mean roughly the same) and sentence completion. Suppose I asked you to fill in the gap in the following sentence:

“Julia is looking for ___ purse.”

You’d probably say “her” or “my” or any other pronoun. Even a possessive noun phrase like “the cat Pablo’s” would work. But you wouldn’t guess something like “toothbrush” or “Las Vegas.” Why? Because of linguistic intuition.

Training a language model

Language models seek to model linguistic intuition. That is not an easy feat. As we’ve said, linguistic intuition isn’t learned through schooling but through constant use of a language (Noam Chomsky even postulated the existence of a special “language organ” in humans). So how can we model it?

Today’s state of the art in NLP is driven by large neural networks. Neural language models like BERT learn something akin to linguistic intuition by processing millions of data points. In machine learning, this process is known as “training.”

To train a model, we need to come up with tasks that cause it to learn a representation of a given domain. For language modeling, a common task consists of completing the missing word in a sentence, much like in our example earlier. Through this and other training tasks, a language model learns to encode the meanings of words and longer text passages.

So how do you get from a computational representation of a language’s semantic properties to a model that can perform specific tasks like question answering or summarization?


General-purpose Versus Domain-specific Language Models

General language models like BERT or its bigger sister RoBERTa require huge amounts of data to learn a language’s regularities. NLP practitioners often use Wikipedia and other freely available collections of textual data to train them. By now, BERT-like models exist for practically all the languages with a sufficiently large Wikipedia. In fact, we at deepset have produced several models for German and English, which you can check out on our models page.


So what can you do with these models? Why are they so popular? Well, BERT can be used to enhance language understanding, for example in the Google search engine. But arguably the biggest value of general-purpose language models is that they can serve as a basis for other language-based tasks like question answering. By exposing it to different datasets and adjusting the training objective, we can adapt a general language model to a specific use case.

Fine-tuning a language model

There are many tasks that benefit from a representation of linguistic intuition. Examples of such tasks are sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, question answering, and others. Adapting a general-purpose language model to such a task is known as fine-tuning.


Fine-tuning requires data specific to the task you want the model to accomplish. For instance, to fine-tune your model to the question-answering task, you need a dataset of question-answer pairs. Such data often needs to be created and curated manually, which makes it quite expensive to generate. On the bright side, fine-tuning requires much less data than training a general language model.

Where to look for models

Both general-purpose models and fine-tuned models can be saved and shared. The Hugging Face model hub is the most popular platform for model-sharing, with tens of thousands of models of different sizes, for different languages and use cases. Chances are high that your own use case is already covered by one of the models on the model hub.

To help you find a model that might fit your needs, you can use the interface on the left side of the model hub page to filter by task, language, and other criteria. This lets you specifically look for models that have been trained for question answering, summarization, and many other tasks. Once you’ve found a suitable model, all you need to do is plug it into your NLP pipeline, connect to your database, and start experimenting.

How to handle domain-specific language

Though we often talk about languages as if they were homogeneous entities, the reality is very far from that. There are, for example, some professional domains — like medicine or law — that use highly specialized jargon, which non-experts can barely understand. Similarly, when a general BERT model is used to process data from one of those domains, it might perform poorly — just like a person without a degree in the field.

A technique called domain adaptation provides the solution: here, the pretrained model undergoes additional training steps, this time on specialized data like legal documents or medical papers.


The Hugging Face model hub contains BERT-based language models that have been adapted to the scientific, medical, legal, or financial domain. These domain-specific language models can then serve as a basis for further downstream tasks. For instance, this highly specialized model extracts named entities (like names for cells and proteins) from biomedical texts in English and Spanish.


What Can Language Models Do?

Language models can seem very smart. In this demo, for example, we show how well our RoBERTa model can answer questions about the Game of Thrones universe. It’s important to note, though, that this language model doesn’t actually know anything. It is just very good at extracting the right answers from documents — thanks to its mastery of human language and the fine-tuning it received on a question-answering dataset. It operates similarly to a human agent reading through documents to extract information from them, only much, much faster!

Other types of language models take a completely different approach. For example, the famed GPT family of generative language models actually do memorize information. They have so many parameters — billions — that they can store information picked up during training in addition to learning the language’s regularities.

So what can a language model do? Exactly what it’s been trained to do — not more, not less. Some models are trained to extract answers from text, others to generate answers from scratch. Some are trained to summarize text, others simply learn to represent language.

If your documents don’t use highly specialized language, a pre-trained model might work just fine — no further training required. Other use cases, however, might benefit from additional training steps. In our upcoming blog post, we’ll explore in more detail how you can work with techniques like fine-tuning and domain adaptation to get the most out of language models.


Composable NLP with Haystack

Modern NLP builds on decades of research and incorporates complex concepts from math and computer science. That’s why we promote a practice of composable NLP with Haystack, which lets users build their own NLP-based systems through a mix-and-match approach. You don’t have to be an NLP practitioner to use our framework, just as you don’t need to know anything about hardware or electricity to use a computer.

Want to see how to integrate pre-trained language models into an NLP pipeline? Check out our GitHub repository or sign up to deepset Cloud.

To learn more about NLP, make sure to download our free ebook NLP for Product Managers.