Quotes & Sayings


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, February 11, 2022

Index - Process Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead


A.N. Whitehead, Mathematician, Philosopher



INDEX TO PROCESS PHILOSOPHER

Alfred North Whitehead





A Short Introduction to Whitehead

by R.E. Slater


Below are linked articles to A.N. Whitehead found on this website here, Relevancy22. In the early years of contemporary Christian research and website development Whitehead's name continued to pop up in random discussions as I was beginning my quest to better understand the Christianity I had inherited, attended, was trained, studied, and ministered within. At first the Lord began my journey in a spreading fog of disturbed spiritual darkness and seeming divine abandonment. This lasted nearly a year which I describe as my time in a wilderness of God's making. Out of this dissettling stage of self-deconstruction began the real work of deconstructing my religious Christian heritage. It began with a writing campaign begun here around 2012 for approximately six months before shortly thereafter turning to reconstruct the Christianity I had envisioned during my wilderness days of darkness and abandonment. Since then, I've been going back-and-forth between both processes attempting to sharpen my concerns and Spirit-led theological focus. During the first several years of my journey recorded here in Relevancy22 I sought to find a comprehensive centralizing hermeneutic to the Bible beyond the more general approach of a "grammatical, historical, contextual" reading of Scripture (I quickly had gotten rid of the "literal" approach to the Bible for sundry reasons).

Sure, reading the Bible from a Covenantal redemptive approach helped as did following upon the themes of Christ as the midpoint of Salvific history. But there were other inductive biblical approaches as well which formed my senior capstone project for graduate studies. Biblical themes such as Redemptive Typologies; locating the Discontinuities & Continuities between the Testaments; a Kingdom of God approach (my choice here was to go with the God of Love approach rather than the God of wrath and judgment approach). Some few other biblical approaches were to look at the Redemptive changes occurring between Covenanted Communities (the Mosaic/Judges period, Monarch/Kings era, Priests/Temple communities, Jesus/Church, and Kingdom era). Or, even to combine this latter with the Promises of God approach to each covenanted community. But none seemed to help me discover a clearer reading of the bible for today's contemporary, polyplural societies. They were still stuck in their sheltered worlds of Christian apology (sic., the "defense" of its faith).

The problem I determined was that of an insufficient philosophical base. For instance, the mechanistic, non-organic approaches of Western philosophy felt artificial, plastic, and just plain empty. Switching to the Continental philosophies I found them to be much more helpful in dislocating ourselves as the centralizing perspective for all worldviews. Moreover, its narratival approach to anthropological cultures proved very helpful when reading through the bible's many polyplural "biblical" cultures throughout Israel's - and the Church's - era-specific histories. I could easily make use of those insights from Continentalism than I could of Westernized syllogism and formulaic statement when separating out genre, literary type, and culturally redactive elements in biblical storylines. This approach also proved adept at helping me separate my own sociologically-based church culture from its denominationally located forms of "myoptic" Scripture study and Gospel proclamation.

Additionally, I did not wish to exclude my African, Middle Eastern, or Oriental brethren on this website. I needed a foundational philosophy which could reach out and include their own cultural perspectives, philosophies, and religions if I were to create a contemporary reading and proclamation of the God of Love from the biblical page to all the world. Thus and thus I tumbled into process theology by the circuitous route of Arminianism --> Open & Relational (Process) Theology --> Whiteheadian Process (Relational) Thought. It took about eight years of examining the bible, church history, traditional and contemporary church doctrines and dogmas, and my own current neo-religious evangelical movement which seemed to me to be going "cross-wise" against the grain of the Gospel of Good News in Christ. But by-and-by, the scales fell off my eyes and heart and by the guidance of the Holy Spirit I came to Process Thought by way of the Bible rather than by way of the Process Philosophy of Whitehead itself. And in doing so have felt that I had kept to the best of my Christian traditions while opening it up to a far more healthier perspective of life.

Mostly, I think, I was writing myself towards the process perspective all along which is where the Whitehead and the Process communities eventually met up with me. Towards the end of my eight year journey I had finally decided it wasn't a newer, more comprehensive bible hermeneutic I needed but an altogether different philosophical foundation on which to build a more responsive, enjoining, comprehensive theology of Jesus. Though I was unaware of it at the time, the process community had done a lot of the heavy lifting by resetting the bible upon a non-Westernized, but importantly global, philosophical foundation. A foundation which easily embraced theology... sic, ANY theology, not just a Christian theology... which to me afforded an efficient, yet effective, philosophical-theology basis to proclaim Christianity in a new light utilizing the common language of organic process thought. One that was relevant and contemporary with the societal times we live unlike my own regressive and defensively-minded apologetic Christianity with nothing to learn as it built higher, thicker fortress walls to keep its inquisitive flocks from wandering away. I needed to be outside those apologetic (defensive) bastions, tearing them down where-and-when possible, while searching out new paths of globally communal enlightenment and blessing.

These all I have found through what I am declaring as Process Christianity. A Christianity upon which "progressive Christian" movements, schools, churches, and individuals, might rebuild in healthy, holistic ways leaning into divine Love, selfless service, and resistance to messages of exclusion and unwelcome. 

Just as progressive evangelical Christianity is a much healthier response of church to culture than conservative evangelicalism's response, so too is Process Christian Theology a more holistic progressive response to both when applying Whitehead's Processual Philosophy to Scripture rather than using evangelicalism's non-processual Hellenisation of Scripture. In Process Theology churches and global religions of all types might together embrace a spiritual path to the sublime in community with one another. Towards a future of eco-sociological hope and healing amid a commonwealth of conjoined communions and fellowships with one another in common physical and spiritual cause. It also removes the Westernization of Hellenized Christianity by removing Platonism et al from its theologic structure by recapturing ancient cultural organic thinking (Judaism et al) while striping from these earlier, ancient religions their legalism, violence, and exclusionary practices.

As a Christian, I write as a Christian for a broader, trans-global form of Christianity... all the while advocating by theological structure to non-Christian religions that here, in Process Theology, might their own religious theologies, communities and fellowships find greater interior consistency and common comportment with Christianity and other religions through this integrating metapath of divine enlightenment and non-tribal local and global communal works. For such are the qualities of the myriads of process elements undergirding both Process Philosophy and it's subset of Process Theology. Elements which are communal, consensual, and radicalizing to the very inner workings of the world in their display of the Creator-God of Love and his divine Communion with all who seek redemptive awakening within the fraught eras of human history.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
February 11, 2022
edited and updated July 18, 21, 2022


* * * * * * * *


The articles below are nominally listed in reverse chronological order. That is, from newest to oldest, where a knowledge base is built-up article by article having assumed a reading of all earlier articles. Too, these listings have resulted from an indiscriminate search under separated topical categories as found at Relevancy22, and are related in some way to A.N. Whitehead or Process Philosophy & Theology.


* * * * * * * *


Related Process Indexes
(newest to oldest)



Index - Process Metaphysics









Index - Evolution of Man & Religion






* * * * * * * *




The Philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead
(newest to oldest)





Alfred North Whitehead Quotes




Jay McDaniel - Observations on Process Philosophy: Art, Nature, and Light


John Cobb - "Whitehead's Constructive Postmodernism"
















John Cobb - Whitehead's Process & Reality, Part V - not completed


John Cobb - Whitehead's Process & Reality, Part VI - not completed















* * * * * * * *



Miscellanea re Alfred North Whitehead
(newest to oldest)







Matt Segall & John Cobb - Whither Science? - incomplete draft






Process Poetry - Charles Olson (c.1910-1970) - incomplete draft





Barth & Whitehead - How They Saw The World - incomplete draft



What Does It Mean to Be Human? - incomplete draft

















Classicism v. Process Attributes of God - incomplete draft


Hegel, Whitehead, & Chardin: Trailblazers of a New Cosmology - incomplete draft

























































































What I Learned from (Almost) Attending a Trump Rally


President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., Thursday, March 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

What I Learned from (Almost) Attending
a Trump Rally


October 4, 2019


In January 2016, Donald Trump claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone and not lose supporters.

With the impeachment inquiry underway, his words ring prophetic.

With blatant corruption in full view, with the president turning to foreign powers to pursue his own personal gain, claiming that a coup is afoot, and labelling political opponents traitors, his critics are left wondering if there is anything he could do that would cause his supporters to turn from him.

I’ve wondered as much myself.

As a historian, I’ve spent the last three years examining white evangelical support for Trump. That research pointed me to the centrality of a militant white patriarchy at the heart of conservative evangelicalism that serves as a primary factor in mobilizing white evangelical support for the president. (Coming soon… Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation).

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on my book, Donald Trump descended upon my hometown of Grand Rapids. It was March 28, just days after Attorney General William Barr released his four-page letter detailing the conclusion of the Mueller Report. Then, too, the country was starkly divided. Wary of falling back on stereotypes in my own analysis, I decided to attend the rally to get a more nuanced, up-close glimpse of the president’s supporters.

Photos/Kristin DuMez

I was accompanied by my ten-year-old daughter, a political junkie in her own right. By the time we arrived downtown, the line of supporters stretched around several city blocks. We quickly found our place at the end of the line and settled in for a several-hour wait.

We had no intention of posing as supporters, but neither were we eager to out ourselves as those less-than-pleased with our sitting president. Still, it quickly became apparent that we didn’t look the part.

Although we were white (as was nearly everyone in the line), we were among the only ones not wearing Trump gear, for camo, or red-white-and-blue attire. So much for dispensing with stereotypes.

Everyone in the line was friendly, if not giddy with excitement. “Where are you from?” was the standard greeting. Here, too, we stuck out. Although the rally was in Grand Rapids, we didn’t meet anyone else in our section of the line who was from Grand Rapids proper. Everyone else had come in from neighboring small towns and rural areas, some having traveled several hours by car. Although it was a celebratory atmosphere, one man behind us frequently warned his friends not to post pictures of him on social media. He was afraid that he might lose his job if seen at a Trump rally.

He didn’t, however, hesitate to join in the political chatter. There was plenty of that. Victory cries of “Total exoneration” in light of Barr’s synopsis of the Mueller report. Crude joking about climate change (“What a hoax!”). Confidence that “the militia” would show up to protect us if things got out of hand. The “mainstream media” was a punching bag. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was an ignorant girl who belonged back behind the bar. Hillary Clinton was a punchline. Barack Obama, however, was no joke. Ocasio-Cortez and Clinton could be laughed off, it seemed, but mention of Obama elicited anger, bitterness, and resentment.

It didn’t take a historian trained in the study of race and gender to identify the centrality of both. American flags that blended into Confederate flags were available for purchase. The militant masculinity I’d spent years charting was everywhere apparent. Vendors were hawking T-shirts boasting “God Guns Trump: Keep America Great 2020,” “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and “Trump .45 (Cause the 44 Didn’t Work the Last 8 Years).”

Photos/Kristin DuMez

One could purchase pins for “Bikers for Trump,” pins declaring support for the Second Amendment, pins insisting that “Deplorable Lives Matter” and that “Hillary Sucks! But not like Monica!” Meanwhile, “Hot Chicks for Trump” shirts could be purchased, as could hot pink “Trump Girl” t-shirts emblazoned with a star-spangled stiletto heel.

Other t-shirts gleefully promised to “Make Liberals Cry Again,” and provided assurances that Trump “Ain’t A Mistake Snowflake.” Again, so much for demolishing stereotypes.

Photos/Kristin DuMez

Photos/Kristin DuMez

Photos/Kristin DuMez

Then, three hours into our wait, as the line continued to snake between downtown buildings, the mood began to change. The scheduled start time was drawing nearer, and we peered anxiously at the distance remaining between us and the entrance gates. Late-arriving supporters started to cut in line ahead of us, and our anxiety grew. We’d waited for hours, but it wasn’t at all clear that we’d make it inside.

We were behind the arena when the motorcade pulled up. Trump emerged and the crowd went wild. Once Trump was inside, attention once again turned to the line that stretched ahead. We all sensed it would be close.

It was at this point that something strange happened. For the first time that day, my daughter and I started to feel at one with the crowds. We didn’t share in their support of the president, it’s fair to say, but we all had the common goal of making it inside those doors—even if for very different reasons.

Turning the corner in front of the arena, we came face to face with protestors. The noise was deafening, the shouting back and forth obnoxious. My daughter grabbed my arm in fear. I reminded her that many of the protestors on the other side of the barricades were, in fact, our friends. Some were co-workers, some went to our church. We both knew it, but in that moment, it didn’t seem to matter. We were, quite literally, on the other side. From our vantage point, they did seem threatening. And I began to understand.

Other adults began to lavish attention on my daughter. Didn’t she love our president? Wasn’t she proud to be there? And then, suddenly, the line started moving quickly. Crowds were rushing the door. We almost made it in, but when the doors closed, we were stranded outside.

We did, however, have a front-row view of the jumbotron. We listened to Trump rail that “The Russian Hoax Is Finally Dead”—“the collusion delusion is over.” He mocked “little pencil-neck Adam Schiff,” went after the “fake news” media, and accused Democrats of “defraud[ing] the public with ridiculous bullshit.” He was draining the swamp, and he denigrated elites in Washington (“I’m president and they’re not.”)

My daughter was given a MAGA hat. She refused to put it on. We listened to the wild applause inside and outside the arena, but we were silent. When we finally decided we’d heard enough, we slipped through the crowd, walked down the street, and went out for Chinese take-out.

I’d gone to the rally hoping to gain a more nuanced understanding of “the other side,” hoping to realize that we shared a common ground if we only bothered to look. Instead, I left convinced that the gulf separating Americans along partisan lines was wide indeed. Perhaps insurmountable.

With news of impeachment dominating the headlines, I find myself transported back to that Trump rally, and fixated on that gulf. I’m also filled with a sense of wariness, a fear that anger—even righteous anger—may only make things worse.

*Cite: DuMez, Kristin Kobes. “What I learned from (almost) attending a Trump rally.” First published. Anxious Bench. Patheos.com. 3 October 2019.




White American evangelicalism from 1950 to the present hour





Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.



Jesus and John Wayne meets the Holy Post

 

Jesus and John Wayne meets the Holy Post