process studies articles @ religion online...
Volume 8 (1978)
- Number 1, Spring 1978
- Happiness and the Public World: Beyond Political Liberalism by Franklin I. Gamwell
- The Untenability of Whitehead’s Theory of Extensive Connection by Lee F. Werth
- Whitehead’s Principle of Relativity by Jorge Luis Nobo
Whitehead’s metaphysical system offers a political vision beyond liberalism and its assumptions of economic success.
If no geometrical element is a point, then Whitehead’s geometrical account of the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy in terms of mere extensiveness is untenable, as it is when all geometrical elements are points.
The author argues that the doctrine of relativity implies the repeatability of all entities, including actual entities. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is built on the tenet that even particulars are repeatable.
- Number 2, Summer 1978
- Human Agents as Actual Beings by Edward Pols
- The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics< by David Bohm
- The Screwtape Letters and Process Theism by Duff Watkins
The concrete and reflexive circle invoked here by the author is the circle of Being, as the term "ontic power" concedes.
The author suggests that emptiness is really the essence. It contains implicitly all the forms of matter The implicate order really refers to something immensely beyond matter as we know it -- beyond space and time. However, somehow the order of time and space are built in this vacuum. At present there is no law that determines the vacuum state.
Though God instills within every entity its initial conceptual aim, the person of Jesus is important for humankind because Jesus strove diligently and successfully to prehend God and obey the resulting prehensions, thereby keeping his own subjective aim aligned with God’s aim and purpose.
- Number 3, Fall 1978
- Being and Freedom: The Metaphysics of Freedom by Frederick Sontag
- Feminist Concerns and Whitehead’s Theory of Perception by Marilyn Thie
- Hartshorne and the Problem of Personal Identity by Albert Shalom and John Robertson
- On Popper’s Understanding of Whitehead by Juliana Geran Pilon
- Probing the Idea of Nature by Justus Buchler
- Some Proposals Concerning The Composition of Process and Reality by Lewis S. Ford
Is human volition, which gives freedom to fix what otherwise would remain indeterminate, an exception in the natural order, or does freedom belong to Being?
This article examines Whitehead’s theory of perception to indicate how this theory provides a philosophical reinterpretation for two issues of concern to feminists: criticism of cultural symbols, including language, and the importance of intuition and emotion, usually associated with women, in experience.
Shalom and Robertson discuss Hartshorne and his ideas about "personal identity", about the idea that "to be" is "to create," about "soul-substance," about immortality, about the "person" and the "self."
Pilon challenges Karl Popper's criticism of Whitehead’s "wander[ing] off to such questions as the (Platonic) collectivist theory of morality." Pilon suggests that Popper leapt to this conclusion a bit too hastily.
Nature is the complexity of any order, any of the innumerable orders, the complexity of any complexes, the ordinality of any order, the ordinality that limits each complex, the complexity that pluralizes each order.
Whitehead left much to be desired in his order of presentation. Instead of one fixed position, it becomes refracted into a whole series of positions, each leading to the next. Sometimes this sort of analysis is faulted as tending to undercut the systematic unity of the whole. An Appendix helpfully lists eight metaphysical principles that were presented by Whitehead in his classroom lectures at Harvard, October 1 and 4, 1927.
- Number 4, Winter 1978
- Process and Religion: The History of a Tradition at Chicago by Larry F. Axel
- Process Philosophy and Trinitarian Theology by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J.
- The Empirical Dimension of Religious Experience by Nancy Frankenberry
- The Resurrection of the Human Jesus by Joseph M. Hallman
- The Sacrament of Creative Transformation by Bernard J. Lee, S.M.
Process inquiry must continually be nudged toward a broader understanding of its traditions, so that it is not identified simply with one particular system. If it is to follow a genuinely organismic -- not atomistic -- model of inquiry, it must campaign against limited rationalisms and against limiting specializationalism.
The author brings together three unlikely German theologians whose notion of process is probably more Hegelian than Whiteheadian. Moltmann, Mühlen and Jüngel insist that three divine persons are intimately involved in Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection. In and through Jesus the divine life is fulfilled in creation, and creation (above all, human history) is taken up into the ongoing life of God.
The empirical dimension of religious experience is founded on a sensitivity to what Whitehead has discerned as the value matrix of existence, whose religious meaning is grasped in the moment of consciousness which fuses the value of the individual for itself, the value of the diverse individuals for each other, and the value of the world-totality.
That the second person of the trinity rises from the dead is not surprising, because he cannot die. It is the resurrection of the human Jesus which is remarkable, and it is this resurrection which is constitutive of Christian faith.
Jesus as the Christ is the objectification, the sacrament, of the universal proposition which God has made to the world. The church is the living, historical medium, the continuing sacrament, of God’s offer.