“Brightness and illumination are forces which can be equally as hostile to humankind as blinding darkness, under the correct circumstances. The fear and power of God’s Kingdom is revealed in hideous, brutal light, a ray of harshness which reveals ugliness, impurity, and dirt without concern for the results of such unkind exposure. Light, in Western…
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God
No Thinker Thinks Twice: Stability In A World of Fluctuating Process
”Whitehead wanted to give some explanation for how it is that in a world of process we nonetheless are able to recognize and identify definite characters or entities. We are out at sea and glimpse a whale just before it dives under the surface. A moment later, it explodes into the air. “There it is…
The Organic Restlessness of The Whole Body of Creation: Process Theology and Ontotheology
I may certainly be misunderstanding the concept (or understanding it incompletely) but for me, as a process-relational thinker, the pejorative ontotheological criticism/dismissal has never bothered me much in the first place, and as a panpsychically-oriented, panentheistic religious naturalist I again don’t care. A) in the process-relational conception of things the “ontic” category isn’t really meaningful,…
The Absolute is That Which Has No Relation: Thoughts on Religious and Ontological Pluralism
“[Universalism]…is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you…
A Gift and/or Curse, Undeserved: Life, Death, Hope, and ‘Hopium’
“But hope is not optimism or pessimism: You will look like the spoilsport among optimists and the polyanna among pessimists. Hope is the embrace of the possible. In the face of what looks impossible.” –Catherine Keller I recently had a wonderful and thoughtful dialogue in the Process and Faith Facebook group about the subject of…
Domestication and the Divine
Domestication of animals radically changed our relationship to our environment, and the price we paid was high. Diseases from livestock killed many (and with the rise of BSE and avian and swine flus, still do) and only those who developed immunity survived. We can thus see these survivors developing a morbid attachment to these creatures…
Things I’ll Tell My Child Someday: You Don’t Possess Your Identity
………………………. There are so many things that pop in my head–nuggets of wisdom if you will–which I would love to share with my son. The problem is that he is only 10 months old and right now he’s focused on learning how to feed himself. So, I will be posting my fatherly wisdom here for…
Made As Makers: A theopoetic motion picture that teaches us how to talk about the things that matter most.
……………… I was recently asked by one of my favorite educator/poet/theologians, Callid Keefe-Perry, to review his new 45-minute documentary film, Made As Makers. I felt honored. ……………… “Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them” ~Dana Gioia To paraphrase the illustrative Peter Rollins, many people of faith feel a desire to…
A Christmas Prayer
“Help us, O God, to rightly remember the birth of Jesus that we may share in the songs of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the magi. Close the door of hate and open the door of love around the world. Let kindness come with every gift and good desire…
A photograph: Original Poem by Jeramy Mohler
A photograph I am lonely in my portrait. For I am exposed to the light of a dim god. Her light illuminates my darkness; The cracks and the creases left by disappointment and regret. his shutter silent, like that of the distant tide at the moment it receeds. In my moment of capture Nothing is…