“Reality, Eternality, and Colours: Rimbaud, Whitehead, Stevens”
In this paper I aim to challenge the modernist notion of reality as comprised of a fact and facticity which is divorced from questions of potentiality, transcendence and eternality. Using the works of Rimbaud, Whitehead and Stevens, I attempt to develop an approach which insists upon the process of becoming whereby the world transcends itself and thus is utterly suffused by potentiality. In order to do this I compare the role of the notion of colour in the works of these three writers. I will argue that they all identify colour as a privileged site or aspect both of existence and experience and refuse to reduce the expression of colour to either the factual or the human realm. In doing so, they offer a way of thinking both the role of poetry as philosophy and, more importantly, indicate a mode of thought which enables facticity, eternality and transcendence to be thought together.

“A Blue Coat, A Red Rose, A Whitehead, A Stein, An Olson, A Process Poetics”
Abstract not yet received.

“God as Trinitarian Creativity: An Interreligious Theological Vision”
This paper continues my work in formulating a speculative trinitarianism that is derived from and in turn grounds comparative theology done in trialogue with Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist traditions. Elsewhere, I have argued that Advaita Vedānta holds to a vision of ultimate reality as ground of world and humanity, Christian traditions celebrate a vision of ultimate reality as (giving rise to) contingency, and Buddhist traditions (specifically Madhymaka) as articulating a vision of ultimate reality as relation. In this paper, I reiterate this argument and then propose a theological ontology in which these three accounts of ultimacy can be synthesized with the help of a process account of God as ontological creativity. Divine creativity is a dynamic and qualitative ground for all creatures, a creativity that gives rise to really contingent creatures with which that creativity never ceases to be in relation. Still more, those creatures too are distinct but not separate from each other. Relation thus holds true for the nature of God’s relationship with the world and worldly events as such. Moreover, because the creatures to which God gives rise are never separated from creativity, God is really enriched by contingency. I shall argue that this vision of the creative divine life is rich enough to be a site of interreligious theological collaboration—a process of ongoing correction and enrichment. The result is a theological ontology that is neither foundational nor finished but is instead under construction and revision through interreligious dialogue.

“The World as an Ultimate: Children as Windows to the World’s Sacredness”
My grandson, Elliot, Matters. His ultimate worth needs no justification. Yet, reflecting on both Tillich and Whitehead can help us understand how children and other creatures participate in and reveal to us a web of infinite values constituting the World. John Cobb, Jr., has sought to transform Buddhist Christian dialogue by proposing that both Emptiness (read as Whitehead’s Creativity) and God can stand as mutual metaphysical ultimates. He has also allowed that the World can stand as a third ultimate. I argue in favor of the World as a metaphysical and spiritual ultimate, as a way to transform dialogue between theists and non-theists, especially in the community of process relational thinkers.

“Theo-logical and Theopoesis: A Kierkegaardian Turn Toward Poetic Spirit in Possibility”

"This impotence of the logical consists of the transition of logic into becoming, where existence and actuality come forth."
         -Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

Kierkegaard's most philosophically focused works offer an extended rebuttal to the Hegelian dialectical scheme which wielded tremendous influence in Danish thought of the era.  Against what Mark C. Taylor, in Journeys to Selfhood,  labels Hegel's desire to reclaim the "spirit" of the age through a movement of the person into a spiritual society, Kierkegaard argues that the spirit is encountered individually, in the midst of society.  Against Hegel's insistence on the ultimacy of reason as a tool of reconciliation, Kierkegaard argues that logic, while not without a proper and robust place in thought and society, is a phenomenon of the past, and has little or no potentiality for "becoming."  Instead, Kierkegaard suggests that a passionate encounter with the God as possibility for the future presents the most immediately vital avenue for human engagement with the divine.  Logic, according to Kierkegaard, does not move or become, but is static.  The connection between the actual and the possible will, for Kierkegaard, occur not in a rational process, but in a passionate struggle carried out by the self.

Taking Kierkegaard's response to Hegel on the topic of logic as a point of departure, this paper approaches the tension (a tension maintained and valued in true Kierkegaardian fashion) between theo-logic and theopoetics as an affirmation of process theism, particularly its understanding of God in possibility.  By way of affirming what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Kierkegaard opens up a space for possibility (later the site of Derridean impossibility) in a productive tension analogous in many ways to the process "event."  Shifting from philosophical sources to more doctrinal theological terrain, this paper will explore the resonances between Kierkegaard's "spirit" and the Spirit described in pneumatology.  The recent work of Roland Faber will serve as a theological focus point, drawing from Whitehead,  the pneumatology of Jürgen Moltmann (which employs a tension between a finite world and a God of possibility to create the dynamism of hope so central to his work), and from postmodern theorists to articulate the Spirit as a creative, dynamic force that interfaces between the concrete and the Possible.

Through this analysis, Kierkegaard's thought will emerge not simply as another point of engagement between process and classical theism, but will be shown to inscribe a necessary dialectic tension between the rationally critical, scientifically engaged thought that will be here called "theo-logic" and an openness to God's activity as poesis, a creative, luring, energizing of the world toward increasing novelty.  By situating the work of the Spirit in this dynamic difference, where Kierkegaard finds the self, I hope to create a space for the articulation of radically creative, ethically engaged, human activity in-spired by the God of possibility.

“Consider the Lilies and the Peacocks: Towards a Theopoetics of Life”
Whitehead, Bergson and Deleuze, each in their own way, theorize life as a process of becoming that exceeds or supersedes mere functionality or law-governed necessity.  Their philosophies of life allow us to see the emergent/divergent evolutionary achievements of life in complex eco-systems less as a mechanistic execution of pre-determined rules than an indeterminate enfolding/unfolding of intensive connections and alliances whose telos – to the extent that one can be spoken of – can be described only in aesthetic terms. This paper will explore some of the ramifications of Elizabeth Grosz’s Deleuzian/Bergsonian philosophy of art and life (human, plant and animal) for an eco-process theopoetics. For Grosz, the same dynamics that give rise to art in human culture are present throughout the natural world – namely, the creation or extraction of sensations by “framing,” filtering, or contracting various aspects of the earth’s “chaos” or natural/material forces.  Art and nature both inherently pursue a kind of “useless” production – production of novelty for its own sake or for the sake of beauty, intensity and enjoyment.  Whitehead similarly defines life – particularly in his concept of the “entirely living nexus” occurring within the interstitial spaces of the organism – as a “bid for freedom” which exceeds the functional identities of the structured societies within which it is embedded.  My constructive theological proposal would take its cue from Roland Faber’s linking of theopoetics to a divine “polyphilia” – God’s in/different love of multiplicity in excess of any single, pre-ordained trajectory or plan.  This more Deleuzian eco-process theology would embrace God’s gift of “aesthetic purposelessness” to life’s events, not in the spirit of a “dissolute” self-involvement, but so as to expand the aims of human life beyond the narrowly defined functions of self-propagation and techno-scientific mastery. Again, following Faber, an eco-process theology responsibly attuned to its more-than-human context would be less concerned with the preservation of any particular order, than with the deepening and creative intensification of our mutual ecological enfoldment – an enfoldment made possible by the world’s enfoldment in God and God’s enfoldment in the world.

“The Gravity of Love: Theopoetic Multiplicity and Postmodern Sacramentality”
Abstract not yet received.

“What About the Fairies?: Grace and the Dance of the Manifold”
“Philosophy,” says Whitehead at the end of Process & Reality, “may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.” Theology likewise, perhaps even more than philosophy, must attend to the manifoldness of life. But in its focus on the cross, has Christian theology forgotten that the fairies also dance? I suggest that grace, as signifier of both divine gift and fluent beauty, may serve as the key to a new theological aesthetics. Classically grace has been understood, especially within Protestantism, as the divine response to humans’ moral shortcomings: we are justified, sanctified, forgiven. Moreover, embodiment and the senses are most often seen as impediments to the work of grace rather than its conduits. What vision of grace emerges, however, when process theology takes to doctrinal heart Whitehead’s dual conviction that divine “Love... is a little oblivious as to morals” and that “the teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty”? This paper begins to imagine grace in a process-aesthetic key. Even as I take seriously the recent work of constructive theologian Serene Jones—who proposes her own poetic and embodied approach to grace specifically in the light of trauma—I invite us to remember the fairies. I seek to re-vision grace, of and for the manifold, as those embodied events of vivification that arise from the co-creative encounter of divine love and human poiesis. And I ask: might the telos of grace be not only to heal but to delight?

“Widening the Seas: On Poetry, Being Propositioned, & Other Subtle Glories”
Abstract not yet received.

“Towards a Heraldic Gospel: Theopoetic Perspectives on Revelation and Repentance”
The major task of this paper is the development of a Heraldic model for interpreting revelation that is community- affirmed and acknowledges (a) that truth is always articulated in a contingent context, (b) that contingency of articulation is unavoidable and does not necessarily lead to relativism, and (c) that the proclamation of such a truth can be the grounding of a faithful, inclusive, Christian life. The interpretive stance explored draws on some of John Howard Yoder's work in missiology as well as the notion of the theopoetic to explain the quality of faith statements pertaining to religious truth and experience.

The Heraldic approach is largely marked by gestures of invitation and space-making rather than colonial exchange. In addressing the formation of a Heraldic mindset, this paper explicates the qualities of common totalizing, uniform, monorthodox doctrines of revelation, explores how such doctrines influence contemporary articulations of repentance, and conversely, proposes possible constitutive components of a Heraldic theology of dialogical, relational, manifold articulation. Such a theology affirms the liberating and transformational experience of the Divine while recognizing that the expression of that experience will be necessarily multiplicitous and communally developed.

“Theology as a Genre of the Blues”
Abstract not yet received.

“(Theo)poetic Naming and the Advent of Truths: The Role of Poetics in the Philosophy of Alain Badiou”
This paper examines the formal relationship between mathematics and poetics in Alain Badiou’s philosophy. As I discuss in this paper, in order to construct a mathematical ontology completely subtracted from the circulation of sense, Badiou banishes all poetic discourse from ontology. However, as I argue, this separation between mathematics and poetics in Badiou’s philosophy is not so easy to maintain. Working on the assumption that it is necessary to interrelate Badiou’s truth procedures and from his own claim that the naming of events is always essentially poetic, I argue that Badiou’s mathematical ontology harbors an irreducible poetic element. Once this poetic element is generalized to all truth procedures and brought into connection with Badiou’s logics of appearing, drawing on Whitehead I argue for the necessity of supplementing Badiou’s philosophy with a minimal theopoetics of the sensible.

“Theopoetics of Pluralism as the Logical Consequence of Faith”
The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) attempt to understand "theopoetics" as the onto-poetics of pluralism whereby "theologies" of multiplicity can offer robust explanations of the simultaneous authenticity of a variety of the world's religious traditions; and (2) to argue that being a dutiful adherent of one of the world's major religious traditions necessitates that one, at times, adopt a generic religious pluralism, thereby undermining religious exclusivism as a viable option for understanding religious diversity and thus opening a greater space wherein an onto-poetics (or a theopoetics) can provide a more cosmopolitan understanding of religious others. To begin, the paper briefly suggests an onto-poetics as a preferred starting point for the creative construction of theologies of multiplicity. The far more substantial second portion of the paper then provides a robust exploration of what it means to have genuine inter-religious dialogue as a necessary practice for religious adherents and how this activity is invariably concomitant with a basic degree of religious pluralism. Both portions of the paper are meant to be descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive. Making this clear from the start is of great importance since my argument is not meant to be interpreted as a setting of preconditions that must be agreed to for inter-religious dialogue, but rather as an attempt to provide an objective philosophical critique of the positions and possibilities one must logically hold in order for genuine inter-religious dialogue to actually occur without cognitive dissonance.

“Theopoetics and the Pluri-Verse: on Process Polydoxy”
Abstract not yet received.