[Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers are from Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019)] Hagglund: “an immanent critique of religion must transform the assumed meaning of God and show that the divine cannot be anything [...]
This is excerpted from a funeral homily that I actually did preach. I have taken out names and pronouns and any other personal references that might identify the person or the family. References to the funeral service are to my own Episcopal [...]
When you address me as "you" and speak of yourself as "I," and when I address you as "you" and speak of myself as "I," only then do I begin to glimpse the fundamental and immeasurable import to being an "I" or [...]
Process theists have been accused of domesticating transcendence. In fact, that’s the charge of a very instructive work by William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996): “God is not [...]
Process thinkers reframe experience in ways that emphasize relational, flowing distinctions over absolute, fixed divisions. This need not imply relativism, however. In fact, many process thinkers insist that there are still statements, principles, etc., that are true always and everywhere, and if [...]
Most people who know Sallie McFague’s work don’t immediately think of her as a process theist. They think of her as a feminist theologian, an ecotheologian, or a metaphorical theologian, and she is of course all of these. I would say that [...]
Contemporary process thought originally set out to be a way of framing a unified concept of nature that does not undermine the only way we arrive at such a concept—through our experience of nature.* Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John Dewey, William [...]
“Reality is event, not substance. The Ultimately Infinite Real (whether named Void, Open, Being, Creativity, Good, gods, God) … is a verb, not a noun.”—David Tracy, Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 2. [...]
Paul Tillich finally comes out as an “eschatological” panentheist at the very end of his three-volume Systematic Theology: “Eternal Life is life in the eternal, life in God. This … agrees with the Pauline vision that in ultimate fulfillment God shall be [...]
[This was originally for a course where Richard Grigg’s book had been assigned. “Pantheism,” like almost any other word associated with theism, comes in a variety of forms that can shade into other types of God-talk.] According to Richard Grigg, pantheism “equates [...]