R.E. Slater - Personal Update, May 2024

Me and my grandsons reading a story together

Hello to all. I'm not promising to be back in full but will begin to find a new rhythm since the massive collapse of my health in late January. As update, I'm healthy again but without a foot, and am learning to hobble around until a prosthetic can be installed and I learn to walk again. As such, though healthy my energy and ambition levels waffle up-and-down day-in and day-out.

Secondly, I have built this website to serve as a personal wikipedia of sorts... that is, I have shared by evangelical journey from fundamentalism to conservative evangelicalism to post-evangelicalism. Along the way I've discussed many of the major Christian doctrines which I had accepted, then questioned, and now have modified through process-based Christian theology.

Thirdly, Whitehead's process metaphysic became the best way for me to update my past church and Christian heritage. It's up to date, contemporary, and comports very well with today's intellectual discussions across all areas and disciplines of human thought, belief, and endeavor. I have become very, very happy with this discovery.

Fourthly, Process Christianity can now easily absorb and expand conservative evangelicalism and it's sister-religion, progressive evangelicalism. Using Whitehead's process metaphysic and cosmology Christians can more completely speak of God, Jesus, the Spirit, God's Love, and what the Christian mission has been and now is when informed by Christ's love.

Fifthly, this entire journey and academic recount has been listed as topics and/or more completely indexed in the column to the right. Use all 3000+ articles in it as a help to your own faith journey. I have written it to be both easy to read and academic where it needs to be. I have also left this site open ended for the generations to come to add their own insights and faith journeys.

Sixth, I have several series I have pursuing all at once. Though the posts may seem unrelated to one another as I skip around, I will eventually - if I haven't already - leave a clear reading order through appropriately titled Indexes. Here are some of the series I am working on:

• Evolution in general
• The Evolution of God and Religion
• The Evolution of human societies/civilizations
• All things Process - Keeping Up to Date in Studies
• Process-based Cosmology including Quantum Sciences and AI
• Amazing Quantum AI and How to Use It
• Why MAGA Christianity is Heretical
• How to Build Processual Ecological Societies
• Etc

Biblical series as I come across them:

• The development of the Torah
• The development of the Jewish Canon
• The development of Human Language
• My Senior Capstone Project from Seminary
• Some of my Inductive College and Sem Studies
• The Lukan Parables
• The Kingdom of God
• The Sermon of the Mount
• etc

Seventh, and last, since retiring many years ago the cost of reading material has gone up. I do not carry ads on this site as I detest anything which takes away from our focus. However, I do need help with resources from time to time and believe I should place a link for a capped annual stipend to help me with costs from this point forward. So look for that to come near the top of the site. As example, the books listed below would be a help in me developing how Christianity got to where it is based upon proto-beliefs in ancient human history. 

Blessings to all,

R.E. Slater

May 11, 2024

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I'm very glad to see other theologs picking up on the idea of love in religion. My past evangelical faith claims to speak God's love but it's "God of War" and "War Crimes" + it's "MAGA God" is not a loving God but a devolved image of man playing God.

So if Judaism can claim love sans it's current administration of radical rightwing war lords killing Gaza children then I think Christians should also let go of their evangelical tribulation, hell, and civil injustice to all non-white anti-supremacists. - re slater

Book Description

A profound, startling new understanding of Jewish life, illuminating the forgotten heart of Jewish theology and practice: love.

A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law. In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held―one of the most important Jewish thinkers in America today―recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity. Blending intellectual rigor, a respect for tradition and the practices of a living Judaism, and a commitment to the full equality of all people, Held seeks to reclaim Judaism as it authentically is. He shows that love is foundational and constitutive of true Jewish faith, animating the singular Jewish perspective on injustice and protest, grace, family life, responsibilities to our neighbors and even our enemies, and chosenness.

Ambitious and revelatory, Judaism Is About Love illuminates the true essence of Judaism―an act of restoration from within.

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Book Description

Archaeological excavation in the Holy Land has exploded with the resurgence of interest in the historical roots of the biblical Israelites. Israelite Religions offers Bible students and interested lay leaders a survey of the major issues and approaches that constitute the study of ancient Israelite religion. Unique among other books on the subject, Israelite Religions takes the Bible seriously as a historical source, balancing the biblical material with relevant evidence from archaeological finds.

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Book Description

Few topics are as broad or as daunting as the God of Israel, that deity of the world's three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who has been worshiped over millennia. In the Hebrew Bible, God is characterized variously as militant, beneficent, inscrutable, loving, and judicious. Who is this divinity that has been represented as masculine and feminine, mythic and real, transcendent and intimate?

The Origin and Character of God is Theodore J. Lewis's monumental study of the vast subject that is the God of Israel. In it, he explores questions of historical origin, how God was characterized in literature, and how he was represented in archaeology and iconography. He also brings us into the lived reality of religious experience. Using the window of divinity to peer into the varieties of religious experience in ancient Israel, Lewis explores the royal use of religion for power, prestige, and control; the intimacy of family and household religion; priestly prerogatives and cultic status; prophetic challenges to injustice; and the pondering of theodicy by poetic sages.

A volume that is encyclopedic in scope but accessible in tone and was honored with all three of the major awards in the field in three seperate disciplines (American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) 2020 Frank Moore Cross Award, 2021 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, 2021 Biblical Archaeology Society Biennial Publication Award for the Best Book Relating to the Hebrew Bible), The Origin and Character of God is an essential addition to the growing scholarship of one of humanity's most enduring concepts.

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Book Description

Yahweh is the proper name of the biblical God. His early character is central to understanding the foundations of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheism. As a deity, the name appears only in connection with the peoples of the Hebrew Bible, but long before Israel, the name is found in an Egyptian list as one group in the land of tent-dwellers, the Shasu. This is the starting-point for Daniel E. Fleming's sharply new approach to the god Yahweh. In his analysis, the Bible's 'people of Yahweh' serve as a clue to how one of the Bronze Age herding peoples of the inland Levant gave its name to a deity, initially outside of any relationship to Israel. For 150 years, the dominant paradigm for Yahweh's origin has envisioned borrowing from peoples of the desert south of Israel. Fleming argues in contrast that Yahweh was not taken from outsiders. Rather, this divine name is evidence for the diverse background of Israel itself.

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Book Description

This compendium examines the origins of the God Yahweh, his place in the Syrian-Palestinian and Northern Arabian pantheon during the bronze and iron ages, and the beginnings of the cultic veneration of Yahweh. Contributors analyze the epigraphic and archeological evidence, apply fundamental considerations from the cultural and religious sciences, and analyze the relevant Old Testament texts.

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Book Description

Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms―Yhwh, God, or Allah―by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.

That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe―the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah―that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism.

A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.

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Book Description

Understanding of the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Israelites has changed considerably in recent years. It is now increasingly accepted that the biblical presentation of Israelite religion is often at odds with the historical realities of ancient Israel's religious climate. As such, the diversity inherent to ancient Israelite religion is often overlooked-particularly within university lecture halls and classrooms. This textbook draws together specialists in the field to explain, illustrate and analyze this religious diversity. Following an introductory essay guiding the reader through the book, the collection falls into three sections.

The first focuses on conceptual diversities. It deconstructs common assumptions about Israelite religion and reconstructs Israelite perceptions of the nature of the religious world. The second section examines socio-religious diversities. It studies the varied social contexts of ancient Israelites, exploring the relationship between worshippers' social locations and their perceptions and experiences of the divine. The third section deals with geographical diversities. It seeks to understand how geographical distinctions engender certain characteristics within Israelite religion and impact upon religious perceptions.

Underpinning each essay in this volume is a shared concern to: (1) explore the ways in which worshippers' socio-cultural contexts shape and colour their religious beliefs and practices; (2) assess the role, benefits and limitations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in reconstructing ancient Israelite religion.

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Book Description

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male.

Here is a portrait - arrived at through the author's close examination of and research into the Bible - of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe - and every part of the body in between - this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.

Jay McDaniel & Sheri Kling, "The Rapture of Being Alive"

The Rapture of Being Alive

Two Hymns by Sheri D. Kling

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God as Singer, God as Song

by Sheri Kling

​​

​While all of this “becoming” is a beautiful thing, for those of us in the midst of upheavals and changes, life can feel quite chaotic, random, and difficult. Yet it has always been my sense that there is a certain grace within the chaos of life because the Divine is at work at its very heart. When order trembles with something new, we witness an ineffable holiness that is raw and powerful. Yet, we can also tune our ears to hear the strains of the Song that the Divine Singer is singing, which I believe is the song that our hearts yearn to sing as well.

​*Sheri D. Kling, Re-Tuning Religion in a Process-Relational Key, in Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God

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The Rapture of Being Alive

Several years ago I developed a slideshow naming six ways that the God of open and relational (process) theology can be understood and experienced. (Click here.) We can feel and know God as:

1. The Universe itself as interwoven with divine love
2. A Companion to the world's joys and sufferings
3. A Guiding and animating spirit in the universe
4. The Spirit of Creative transformation
5. The Mind of the universe
6. The everlasting Song of the universe

Many open and relational theologians like to speak of God as a luring presence in the universe; that's what I had in mind by a Guiding Spirit and the Spirit of Creative Transformation. But a way that is especially important to all of us who love music is the sixth way. God as the Song of the universe.

It is not that everything that happens in the universe is the divine song. Terrible things happens that are not musical in a divine way. But much music that we hear does indeed resonate with a song we hear in our heart as well: a song of grace, of yearning, of creative transformation, of longing, of love. As Sheri Kling makes clear, we hear the strain of this song within us, even in the hardest of times, and we are moved by its holiness, raw and powerful. She often speaks the whole-making nearness of God. I hear that nearness in her music.

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I thought of this sixth way when I read her essay "Re-Tuning Religion in a Process-Relational Way" in the anthology: "Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God." In this essay she introduces and discusses two hymns she has written: "We All are Related" and "Love is Perfect Power." I also thought of the sixth way when I found versions of her singing the hymns on Youtube. (Scroll down and listen.) I have heard her before, many times, and I think her voice is gorgeous. I'm hoping that, in heaven, there are angels that sound like Sheri. To me you can hear in her singing not only a conviction but also a hope, not only an affirmation but an aching. The angels in heaven must be like this, too. Surely they share in the aching of living beings on earth - in the heartbeat of billions of bodies just wanting to be.

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Here are some of the lyrics in “We All are Related”:

God is embodied, Word become flesh, in all that we see.

Deeply incarnate in every bird, in every tree.

In the heartbeat of billions of bodies just wanting to be.

God is embodied, soul of the world, breathing in me.

As I read these lyrics, I ask myself: "Billions of bodies wanting to be what? What do the myriad creatures of our universe—quantum events, living cells, plants, animals, stars, galaxies—want to be? What are they seeking and perhaps even aching for?"

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At the end of her essay, Sheri Kling offers what, for me, is as good answer as I can imagine: "They want to be fully alive in whatever ways are possible for them!" She writes:

But I believe there are many of us who ache for what Joseph Campbell described in The Power of Myth as 'the rapture of the experience of being alive'; people who, like me, can sometimes glimpse the Oneness of a grace-filled Reality that exults in embodiment, even with its heart-rending sorrows.

I believe there are those who seek to align themselves with the sacred flow of healing love, dynamism, and adventurous creativity that can bring relationship, reconciliation, transformation, and abundant life to all. Let us now sing those hopes into being. - Sherri Kling

To be sure, in this passage Sheri is speaking primarily of human experience, but the whole of “We Are All Related” is about how we humans are kin to other creatures, to other “bodies just wanting to be.” It is not a stretch to imagine that they, too, seek full aliveness. We seek the rapture of being alive, but so do dogs and cats and fish and insects. We are related.

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For my part, I am grateful for the quotation from Joseph Campbell. The quote reminds me of a question a student of mine asked me once, while taking a seminar on Whitehead's "Process and Reality." She had been reading Campbell and knew the 'rapture' quote. She asked:

If you take Whitehead's philosophy seriously, what is most important in life: the rapture of being alive or finding meaning in life?

Knowing that Whitehead is a both/and thinker, but not wanting to dismiss her, I offered a pat and predictable answer. I responded:

"Maybe that's a false dichotomy. We can have it both ways. The rapture of being alive is the meaning of life."

She, [the student], would have none of it! She was surrounded by people who think that making or finding something called "meaning" is the purpose of life, and typically by 'meaning' they have something somewhat intellectual in mind, like having a story or narrative in terms of which the many moments of life can be situated. Or maybe having 'meaning' because you are engaged in 'meaningful' activities such as loving other people and helping make the world a better place. The meaning-seeking people she knew thought the rapture of being alive, while enjoyable, is not really an end in itself. It lacks narrative and ethics. She said:

"The insects will never understand. They don't seek meaning, they seek life."

*

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I know that Sheri Kling would certainly think that having stories and being ethical are part of what gives human life meaning. She might well agree with my pat answer. But she (Sheri Kling) also speaks about the "many of us who ache for the rapture of the experience of being alive." It seems to me that this aching is not simply for meaning; it is for being alive. And this we share with all creatures: Insects, microbes, plants, animals, fungi, and all forms of life. Each entity, from the smallest bacterium to the largest whale, aches for aliveness. We all are related.

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Back to my student. She reminded me of Whitehead's idea in "Process and Reality" that in every moment of experience, we are aiming at satisfaction: the self-enjoyment of being one among many. She said, "This sounds to me more like 'the rapture of being alive' than like 'meaning.'"

I think she had a point. True, in many of his writings, Whitehead speaks of the importance of love and peace; he seems to think that Love is the very heart of God, and in "Adventures of Ideas" he says that Peace is the consummation of a soul's journey. Such language sounds like "meaning" language. But he also says, in "Process and Reality," that every actual entity, every concrescing subject anywhere in the universe, is aiming at, in his words, "intensity" of experience, and he describes the enjoyment of such intensity as self-enjoyment. Such language sounds like "rapture" language to me. Perhaps in human life peace and love are forms of rapture, but there is more to rapture than peace and love. Sheer survival, in some circumstances, is rapture enough.

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Whitehead speaks of God as “a fellow sufferer who understands.” What does God understand about us? Here, too, Sheri Kling offers a key. The song includes these two lines:

God’s Spirit moves toward abundant life,

so that all who live may flourish.

Perhaps what God understands is the desire within each living being to flourish, to be fully alive, to enjoy the intensity of momentary rapture.

Certainly, this is what we ourselves understand about other people and other creatures when we love them. We do not just love their meaning, whatever that is. Nor do we simply understand their states of feeling: their sufferings, their joys, their heartaches, their pleasures. We understand their desire to flourish, to be fully alive.

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​Sheri Kling offers us an image of God who likewise seeks the flourishing of each and all, and thus who understands the naturalness and beauty of their desire. The image of God she offers is not that of a sky-god above the world, overseeing it from afar. It is of a holiness in life itself, powerful and raw, yet also more than life itself in that it understands us. I repeat a quote from above:

It has always been my sense that there is a certain grace within the chaos of life because the Divine is at work at its very heart. When order trembles with something new, we witness an ineffable holiness that is raw and powerful.

Can it be that this ineffable holiness is also tender and personal? A fellow sufferer who understands not only our own lives but the lives of all who ache for satisfaction?

*

Sheri Kling speaks of God as Spirit and as Oneness and as Sacred Flow. I especially like sacred flow, because it reminds me of music. You cannot grasp the flow of music, but you can feel its presence and flow with it. I think God is like this. Faith is a form of flowing.

We cannot easily picture the flow, but with help from Sheri Kling, we can hear it. The key to a good hymn, of the sort Sheri Kling composes and sings, is not simply that it gives you guidelines for living and evokes intuitions about life's meanings. It is also that, in its melodies and in its tones, you can hear the aching and the ineffable holiness. An aching for life in its fulness, even if momentarily realized.

That's the love to which her hymns point, not through words alone but through the soulfulness of her singing. God is, after all, the Soul of the universe: the luring companion to each and all, luring toward wholeness, toward aliveness, a companion to all the suffering and to the joy. This spirit of uncontrolling love is not exactly "above" the universe, although more than it, but rather with the universe, in loving way.

My favorite sermons are sung. Sheri Kling's songs are among my favorite sermons.

- Jay McDaniel

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Sheri Kling “We All Are Related”

by Sheri Kling  |   Apr 5, 2020

We All Are Related

by Sheri Kling

(Choral chant)

Fiery brilliance, cooling gas, condensing gravity

Atoms forming stars and carbon-fueled diversity

Earth with sky and oceans, molecules then multiply

Stardust is the mater of the cosmos and all life.

(Congregation)

We all are related, woven as threads in earth’s tapestry

A kinship creation, depending on all in deep harmony.

Internally formed by each other, creative and free

We all are related, wholly and actively.

The world is becoming, the future of God is luring us there.

Grace within chaos, the pow’r of the new, holiness bare.

The Singer is singing the Song we are yearning to share.

The world is becoming, process is everywhere.

God is embodied, Word become flesh, in all that we see.

Deeply incarnate in every bird, in every tree.

In the heartbeat of billions of bodies just wanting to be.

God is embodied, soul of the world, breathing in me.

All things have value, all the way up and all the way down.

God is redeeming the lowliest stone and the glorious crown.

Christ is the pattern in every atom around.

All things have value, whispering Spirit Sound.

We need liberation from seeing our world as dead-matter machines

All creatures as neighbors, a healing embrace, so held we are free.

Entraining our rhythms to the heartbeat of Life consciously,

We all are related,

In a world that’s becoming,

Where God is embodied,

And all things have value,

We are liberated, affirming the world we see.

 © 2011 Sheri D. Kling, Waking Woman Music, ASCAP

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Sheri Kling “Love is Perfect Power”

by Sheri Kling  |  Jun 11, 2020

Love is Perfect Power

by Sheri Kling

Verses to the tune of “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”

Refrain

Love is perfect, perfect power,

Perfect, perfect power is love.   (repeat)

In community we all belong;

We are formed through incarnation.

So when the powers press the weak,

We call for liberation.

This world is full of fear and rage;

Domination steals all choices.

Compassion, boldness, hope, and strength

Empower silent voices.

God’s Spirit moves toward abundant life,

So that all who live may flourish.

Injustice threatens everyone;

Rise up, so all are nourished.

Love is perfect, perfect power,

Perfect, perfect power is love.   (repeat)

Our God does not dominate the world;

We choose each realization.

For perfect love seeks not control,

God’s power is persuasion.

We now must turn from the ordered past,

Seeking God’s imagination.

Divine adventure brings new risks,

for wholeness and salvation.

So we stand and meet all force with love,

Tending seeds of transformation.

We bring the power that can redeem;

God’s reconciliation.

Love is perfect, perfect power,

Perfect, perfect power is love.   (repeat)

 © Sheri D. Kling, Waking Woman Music, ASCAP

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

2024 Interview on Sustainability between Pando, John Cobb, and Mary Elizabeth Moore

“The Temptation of St. Anthony,” Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). Fire threatens to rage over the landscape in a scene populated by strange and eerie creatures. Image courtesy of the Rijks Museum.

Living in strange times

article link

by Pando Populus | Jan. 21, 2024

We try to sit down with Pando’s founding Chair John Cobb as often as we can to talk about the big ideas related to creating a more sustainable world. This time we invited Mary Elizabeth Moore to the conversation. Held over Zoom, and edited for clarity and length, this discussion focuses on doing purposeful work in difficult times, and the philosophical assumptions it implies.

John Cobb has been called the most significant philosophical theologian of our time and is the leading authority on the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and chair of Pando’s Board of Directors.

Mary Elizabeth Moore is Professor Emerita of Theology and Education and Dean Emerita of the School of Theology, Boston University. She is vice chair of the Cobb Institute Board of Directors, in Claremont, CA where she lives in retirement.

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Pando: If I had an artist’s gift, I’d paint our reality today like Hieronymus Bosch painted his five centuries ago, only more bizarre and twisted.

We live in frightening times. How should this affect the work in sustainability that we do? How can it not? At any rate, at what point is it only prudent to give up on change-making and hide under a rock?

I don’t want to sound unduly pessimistic, but who can read the newspaper without asking these questions?

John Cobb: Every year as things get worse, more people say we must act. At this moment, I think our responsibility is to fulfill our calling to do what we feel is right.

For example, last year, I felt called to do something about US-China relations. I believe that there is no possibility of making the changes that need to be made in the human relationship to the planet, physical planet, unless the United States and China work together. It’s about the cooperation of the two major countries.

Mary Elizabeth, your thoughts?

Mary Elizabeth Moore: I appreciate the way John approaches the question through the China-U.S. relations lens and the larger geopolitical situation. For many, however, the demands for survival are so immediate that looking at the large geopolitical picture is challenging and can lead downhill to despair that undercuts any kind of movement toward ecological justice.

We hear the term “ecological justice” a lot, but what do you mean by it?

I’m not only talking about justice for poor communities that are affected by ecological damage. I’m also talking about justice for the trees and the rivers and the rocks. I think to be drawn into that, we need a radical cultural change. My own attention has been focused on cultural change of this kind.

I believe that if we’re going to give our best to reversing and repairing and protecting what’s left, we need to work in several directions at one time and I think what John’s proposing is a very important direction.

Where do you put your own energies with an ecological justice focus in mind?

I have cast my energies into working on smaller projects and cultural change in local communities – taking that route for larger and global impact.

Describing the beginnings of the environmental movement, Vandana Shiva wrote that when small communities around the world started to take note of and discover other small communities working towards similar goals around the globe, the environmental movement really took off.

Local work can seem small potatoes. But the idea of communities of communities linking together can create serious impact.

Yes, and this is why I find the work Pando does to be so extremely hopeful. It may not be changing the world in an instant, but it does spread ideas and projects which are networked together and have the effect of building a new kind of culture. I’m convinced that that is one very important way to go.

Do you think that the local approach to change-making has had much of an effect on how this kind of work is done?

Yes, and we can see this even in the work of the United Nations. Instead of the United Nations taking their own experts around, as they used to do so much of, they are beginning to bring the local experts together to present to one another. And then they work on problems together. And to me, that is an extremely important reversal of culture. Expertise is being drawn from people who are passionate and are working on ecological protection and change and reparation in their own communities. And they’re learning from one another how to do it, and so the work they’re doing is spreading. It’s very effective.

I think that a big part of this approach is that it’s only in local settings that we learn to listen and observe and touch and feel all of creation. So it’s not just learning from diverse human communities what we need to do, but it’s also learning from the trees and the ants and the other animals and the ways they work together, collaborate.

But, if we ignore a more global approach, can’t we get lost in just caring for our own survival? Surely, even at a local level, we need to maintain a global outlook.

I think it’s too easy to separate the local and global – even in drawing from the wisdom of plants and animals.

I know this is a little far out, but take in the fact that ants are the largest species in the world. Collectively, the weight of ants is more than half of the weight of all other animals, including humans, put together. And, they’re spread all over the world.

I use that as an example because to learn from ants is to attend to the global phenomenon of ants, not just the local. Everything, including what’s done locally, is affected by policies that are not only local but global.

My concern is to develop and to learn from the diverse local communities and aspects of creation in order to develop policies that are protective and reparative as much as possible.

And then where the, where things fail at the policy level, and the threats just seem insurmountable, then I think you’re also saying that a local focus at least forms a foundation for resilience – community resilience – to some extent, right?

And it provides a site for mourning. Mourning is a very important part of what needs to happen. If we don’t feel the destruction, we’re not going to be inspired to do anything about it. It’s important.

John, let’s get you back in on this. There was an issue brought up by Alfred North Whitehead at the Apostles club when he was a student at Cambridge in the 19th century. The club was for intellectual discussion, with different topics each week. The topic for one week was, “Shall we beat our heads against brick walls?” and Whitehead answered yes. And then defended it.

Whenever I think of the work any of us are doing on these issues, I think of beating our heads against brick walls. It can feel that way.

But are we really called to beat our heads against brick walls? If so, how do you defend it to everyone who doesn’t want to end up with a very sore head?

John Cobb: Living in history and taking a moral stand inevitably means you’re going to wind up with a sore head one way or another. What that means is that you have to ground a notion of going up against great odds with some sense that in doing so, you’re on the side of what’s right and good and beautiful – and that those values are actually meaningful and real. It’s hard to maintain the courage you need without some sense that the universe is on your side – that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” as the Rev. Martin Luther King put it.

I think that the modernization of the university is one of the major causes of our having lost the ability to think about important matters and ground them. The university holds the ideal of value-free education, but in the absence of values, money fills the void – and education becomes just a tool to make more money. Where that’s the case, it becomes divorced from its true mission – which is serving the common good and trying to do something about the problems that loom on the horizon.

You make this critique as a person whose life was in the university, as a professor. This is true for both of you, of course.

When I single out the university for criticism I am really trying to focus on some key issues that might make a difference quickly because I don’t think we have much time,historically speaking. And on a positive note, I think that the universities are more open to being transformed than they have been for a long, long time.

If the university system were to collectively decide that its job is to save the world, it can go beyond what any other institution of civil society has done. If the enormous resources of the university were rightly used, it could make a rather quick difference.

So that if we have five or ten years before we have to say it really is too late on many important fronts, the transformation of the university may be what we should be working on.

Mary Elizabeth, I’m sure you’d love to break in here.

As John knows, my views of the university are different from his. I have the same ideals, but I see much more of those ideals being embodied in universities than he does.

I have been in higher education for 40 years now and in actual universities for 20. I see what universities are doing that matches what John is saying. And not just in the last two or three years, but I’ve seen it for the 20 years that I’ve been in universities, and before that as well. I’ve had very few colleagues who value learning just for the sake of learning or as its own endpoint, but see higher education as a powerful engine for good.

I would love to go a step further and say, what are the metaphysical assumptions that really are necessary for us to make in order to, as Whitehead put it, continue to hit our heads against brick walls in an effort to bring about change?

I am fearful that we’re in a culture in which even talking about those metaphysical assumptions is so out of fashion. But we’re living in a time when, in fact, without making those assumptions and without discussing them explicitly, we’re really handicapped in our ability to respond to the historical situation we’re in.

I’m curious how either one of you would both respond to that.

The modern dominant metaphysics is a major obstacle. Even so, nobody believes it. I haven’t found anybody who really thinks they are robots.

You’re talking about a materialistic view of the universe where the purposes and meanings we experience and the values we treasure aren’t given the status as being really real — but something we add onto reality, like some sort of decoration to an otherwise material world. But if these things aren’t really real, then it’s hard to think of ourselves as being more than an assemblage of nuts and bolts — or zombies or robots, as you put it, at the end of the day.

But unfortunately, that’s what we teach for the most part.

You’re referencing the fact that metaphysics has no place generally speaking in a discussion of physics at the university.

And physics holds the status as defining what’s most real among academic disciplines.

One approach is to confront the matter head-on, as philosophy might do. Or…

If we can talk about the world as one in a crisis that human beings have contributed to making happen, and then focus our attention on what needs to be done, I think we still have hope. And, I am seeing this hope in Pando and beyond.

How so?

Well, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has recognized that, because climate change is so urgent, we should no longer be neutral when discussing it.

This is a very prestigious academic association, of which you’re a member, saying that education should not be value-free when it comes to the climate.

I also was very interested when the announcement was made of the new president of Columbia University. It was said she had just written a book about values. I have no idea what’s in that book. But the simple fact of it said to me, the climate in higher education is changing. Writing a book about values is now a good thing for an academician to do. Even for getting a good job. I was writing on ethics at a time when doing so kept you at the margins.

So, I’m really hopeful that we can say we made a mistake in thinking that reason – which is simply the accumulation of facts and arguments from facts about facts – could be separated from questions of purpose, value, and life.

Education should grow out of human experience, and experience doesn’t separate facts from values but embraces the whole of life.

Mary Elizabeth?

I would add that the ability to have those conversations has been fueled by years, even decades, of action in that direction. And, I think the kinds of projects that Pando does, the kinds of projects that local communities do – these are actions that often are what open people to talking about the issues in a larger form and writing about values and higher education and so forth.

In the ‘90s, Jay Lifton discovered that the people who were least depressed and least ready to give up on peace were those who were active in the peace movement in some form. And some research has taken place over the years since then has reinforced what Lifton discovered. And that is the kind of action that needs to happen in order for people to have avenues to express their passions and their concerns, and also avenues for people to be open to and explore the metaphysical questions.

I love the connection between action and hope. But Mary Elizabeth, how do you ultimately ground your hope? Action is presumably part of that, but what metaphysical grounding keeps you from just, you know, giving up?

Mary Elizabeth: First, I understand hope is a choice, not an attitude. Optimism is an attitude, but hope is a decision to look for the possibilities.

I’m very much influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and the understanding that the world is always in relationship and is always in process. It is always moving so that no moment is the endpoint, and we’re never going to reach an endpoint. But every moment contributes to the potential of the next moments that are coming, and that potential is so important for the salvation of the world.

You cannot guarantee what the future is going to be. But you can contribute to the potential for flourishing, the potential for justice, the potential for the well-being of all creation.

And I think that is our duty as beings, not just as human beings. Animals and plants have their duties that come out of their natural ways of being.

Each of us doing our part to build potential, where we can. It’s a beautiful articulation you’ve offered.

I will add one other thing. The theologians who’ve written on hope have almost always written on that subject out of dire circumstances. Out of having been in life and death circumstances where not only would their lives personally be threatened, but they saw the whole world or the whole culture being threatened. And the urgency that that brought led them to seek hope.

Jurgen Moltmann is an example. But there are so many examples of this. Hope has been a major theme among Latin American liberation theologians. It’s been a major theme among many feminist, womanist, Mujerista, theologians and so forth. Because it’s a necessity in order to seek ways that open possibilities for something better.

John, you’re a philosopher and philosophical theologian, how do you ground the work you do?

John Cobb: I will talk specifically about God.

I think that if reality as a whole has no values, no preferences, and if nothing contributes intentionally to the survival of valuable things or cares about the increase of values and so forth and so on, then I think it is very difficult to find grounds for hope or to ground any of the work we aim to do.

But if we believe that there is that which favors values – and I think there’s all kinds of scientific evidence actually today that the universe favors life – I think that gives some assurance that even if we humans have a very hard time imagining how we can get from where we are to where we need to be, that there is something else working in that direction.

If we can really open ourselves to its guidance, we have no way of knowing what’s possible. So to me, that’s very important.

To the contrary, I think that value-free thinking of the kind that so much of education has tried to encourage, accompanied by the notion that everything that happens is predetermined in a material world, is not a context in which hope can emerge or be sustained for long.

A final question for you both, given all you know about the state of the world and what you’ve said above: if you were the parent of a young child working for the common good in a major metropolitan area, or would you pick up and flee – to some nice, quiet place? Or would you stay put? If the world were going to hell anyway, why not try to carve out a pleasant niche someplace where it’s not quite as bad?

I haven’t given that any thought. I think I’d just stay with the world as it went to hell.

If there are possibilities of helping a city become more self-sufficient, I think that’s very important. And smaller cities probably have a better shot at that, than the bigger ones.

Frankly, even though I talk about surviving a lot…

Planetary survival, civilizational survival, species…

…yes, at this juncture in my life, I personally have no interest in surviving. I’m ready to go.

Mary Elizabeth, how do you respond?

I think it’s a wonderful question – do we head for the hills or do we stay and do the work we feel called to do, with hope? And I think it begs another question, Why? Why would you head for the hills or why would you stay where you are if you’re in a city? Or why would you move to a big city if you’re not already there? I think the why is the bottom line question, and you framed it originally in terms of rearing children.

I think that a family might ask, in what environment can we contribute the most and can we help our children grow in the most thoughtful and full ways to love the Earth and all the peoples and creatures on it? And, I think you can do that in the middle of a city, and you can do it in a rural area, and you can abuse it in either. I think it’s really a matter of calling and preferences, but the real question is, how can we live in this place in a way that contributes to flourishing?

I have friends who, when they retired, moved and a couple who before they retired, moved into a rural area and are developing the capacity to live off the grid. Some have already accomplished that and I completely admire that. It hasn’t been my calling but I think it’s beautiful when people do that. I also see how people live in cities, crowded cities, in ways that are really caring for the earth and other peoples and are really making a difference in the world.

And I think maybe the best example is the indigenous people who choose to live in their tribal communities, or their nation’s communities, because that keeps them in touch with their roots, their traditions, their ways of life that are more conducive to the survival and thriving of the planet.

And I think those are all good decisions and different people will make different ones. If it were not for those people, the indigenous people who make those choices, we would be impoverished as a nation in terms of thinking ecologically, because of what comes out of those communities. So for those people who’ve made that choice, that is just a huge gift to the rest of us.

I would hope that people who make other choices are making a similar kind of gift out of their own choices, because cities can be extraordinarily humane. And they can also be extraordinarily destructive. They’re usually a mix of everything. But you can make a good life for the planet and the beings on it in the middle of a very busy city, as well as in the countryside.

It was truly a pleasure. Thank you both.

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