Process Theology

Robbed by Monica A. Coleman

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

Life is robbery.”

I re-read this Alfred North Whitehead quotation to my students in the last weeks as we... more Life is robbery.”

I re-read this Alfred North Whitehead quotation to my students in the last weeks as we read through Adventures of Ideas. We were taking a welcome break from the philosophically demanding Process and Reality.

I explained that this is one of Whitehead’s more frequently cited sentences because he succinctly and poetically describes his position that life entails loss, and you can’t go back and get what you lose.

I said the same thing to one of my girlfriends as we chatted in my kitchen a couple of weeks ago. I was cooking and catching up with a friend I had not seen in nearly twenty years. As we chronicled our lives from the intervening decades, my friend said: “I have a religious question.”

In moments like these, I curse the fact that even my closest friends think that I have some special kind of knowledge as a minister and professional theologian. I took a deep breath because that phrase usually precedes some difficult, heart-wrenching question that has no satisfying answer.

Review of Bruce G. EPPERLY. "Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed"

by Hans Gustafson

Why I am Not a Pantheist (Nor a Panentheist): Metaphysics, Totalization, and the Cosmos.

by Jonathan Weidenbaum

Originally published in The Global Spiral (under construction), a publication of The Metanexus Institute.

God Beyond Orthodoxy: Process Theology for the 21st Century - Reading Essay

by Pablo Rivas Perea

A one-page reading essay for the article entitled "God Beyond Orthodoxy: Process Theology for the 21st Century" by Philip Clayton

Darwin and Teilhard: The Theory and Theology of Evolution

by Michele Stopera Freyhauf

This paper examines Darwin's Theory of Evolution against Teilhard de Chardin's Theory that includes a theological slant. This paper examines Darwin's Theory of Evolution against Teilhard de Chardin's Theory that includes a theological slant.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

by Derek Michaud

Edited in The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology

Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000)

by Derek Michaud

Edited in The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology

(2006) A [local] response to Carol Christ

by Dee Michell

With Susan Boulton, Lynne Sinclair-Wood and Dawn Colsey. Published by Women-Church. An Australian Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 2006, 38(Autumn):21-22

“Chaos and Tehomophobia.”

by Derek Michaud

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4, no. 3 (2003): 115-117.

Review of Catherine Keller’s the Face of the Deep (Routledge, 2002). Review of Catherine Keller’s the Face of the Deep (Routledge, 2002).

"Whitehead & the Elusive Present: Process Philosophy’s Creative Core"

by Gregory Nixon

@ *Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research* 1(5), July/2010. 625-639.

Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until... more Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) — all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In so doing, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination or if Whitehead's controlled unfolding process actually denies a truly creative present.