process studies articles @ religion online...
Volume 13 (1983)
- Number 1, Spring 1983
- Aesthetic Value and Relational Power: An Essay on Personhood by C. Robert Mesle
- Art and the Expression of Meaning by John C. Gilmour
- From Mimesis to Kinesis: The Aristotelian Dramatic Matrix, Psychoanalysis, and Some Recent Alternati by Ekbert Faas
- The Philosopher’s Poet: Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago, and Whitehead’s Cosmological Vision by Strachan Donnelley
- The Violets: "A Cosmological Reading of a Cosmology" by Robin Blaser
- Whitehead’s Other Aesthetic by Willliam Dean
- Whiteheadian Poems by Conrad Hilberry
If we take seriously Whitehead’s claim that the fundamental form of order and hence of value is aesthetic, and the accompanying principle of relatedness, it is obvious that unilateral power (the ability to affect without being affected) inherently inhibits the growth of value in human experience.
The author demonstrates a way of thinking which exhibits expression and truth as joint concerns of the artist.
Ekbert Faas discusses the possible connections which might exist between Aristotelan poetics and the contemporary psychological theater as well as psychoanalysis itself.
Pasternak speculated that forms are creatively engendered by the protean nature of life itself, in its active self-renewal with concrete worldly settings. This is more radical and "unPlatonic" than Whitehead’s speculative adventures.
The writer attempts to convert metaphysics into poetry, thus connecting it to the "real."
Dr. Dean discusses Whitehead’s empiricist aesthetics. His rejoinder is that the beautiful speaks in ways not entirely susceptible to rational analysis.
Eight poems by Whitehead
- Number 2, Summer 1983
- The Image of a Machine in The Liberation of Life by Granville C. Henry, Jr.
- The Metaphysics of Cumulative Penetration Revisited by Kenneth K. Inada
- The Power of the Past by Nancy Frankenberry
- Whitehead’s Inability to Affirm a Universe of Value by David L. Schindler
The author presents a mechanistic position based on a contemporary image of a machine and attempts to show its relationship to the ecological model of Birch and Cobb, in which a classical mechanism is presented based on an outdated image of a machine.
Dr. Inada discusses Hua-yen thought. In Appearance and the latter Reality Whitehead agrees in a descriptive sense, with the dharmadhatu is seen as a "merging" phenomenon where such characteristics as harmonization, mutual identity, and penetration, and interfusion are rightly applied.
Whitehead’s account of the nature of experience places great emphasis on the power of the past, the primacy of physical feelings, and the literal transmission of energy as creative causal influx.
Whitehead’s inability to found a universe of value is because he failed to affirm a universal community of subjects and hence values which require an understanding of actuality as a plurality of actual wholes within an Actual Whole, all of which are characterized at once by effective and immanent activity.
- Number 3, Fall 1983
- The Emergent Paradigm and Divine Causation by Nancy Frankenberry
- The Presence of the Past and the Eucharist by John B. Cobb, Jr.
- The Theological Use of Scripture in Process Hermeneutics by David Kelsey
- What Is "Process Hermeneutics"? by David J. Lull
This article suggests two critical emendations in the metaphysical description of God provided in Process and Reality: 1. An identification of "God" with the "totality" and the clarification of the meaning of the concreteness of that datum by assimilating it to the emergent paradigm in science; 2. An articulation of the physical roots of religion’s experience which intends to rectify the preoccupation among process philosophers with final causes to the neglect of efficient causes.
The presence of Jesus is not limited to the Eucharist. But this does not remove the importance of it to many forms of Christianity. If the contributions of the Eucharist were better understood they might dispel the tendency to conceive of it magically and the total rejection so often exhibited.
Dr. Kelsey faces three questions in process hermeneutics: 1. How is the interpretation of the Bible an exercise in process hermeneutics? 2. Is it an equivocal notion naming quite different enterprises? 3. What guidance does process hermeneutics give to normative Biblical texts?
The determination of what is appropriate for Christian theology involves more than an interpretation of "scripture and tradition." It also involves consideration of how and in what direction the Spirit that animated Christian existence in the past will move in the new situational context, in which consideration insights are also drawn from other sources, religious and secular.
- Number 4, Winter 1983
- Process, Time, and God by Bowman L. Clarke
- Whitehead, Special Relativity and Simultaneity by Villard Alan White
- William James and the Epochal Theory of Time by Richard W. Field
Whitehead has two types of process, and the understanding of the difference between these and their relationship to time is essential to understanding his conception of God.
The author challenges the assumption that Whitehead never changed his earlier criticism of relativity. Actually Whitehead later repudiated his earlier concept in favor of one more compatible with Einstein’s.
The author explores the nature of time in the thought of William James and compares his solutions with those of Whitehead.