American Religious Empiricism and the Possibility of an Ecstatic Naturalist Process Metaphysics
Issue: Vol 8 No. 2 (2014) Ecstatic Naturalism and Deep Pantheism
Journal: Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Subject Areas: Religious Studies
Abstract:
The most forceful critiques Robert Corrington mounts against Whiteheadianism target several problematic tendencies in the system of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and other leading Whiteheadian theologians rather than raze the entire legacy of process philosophy and theology. Actually, there is an alternate school of process philosophy and theology—the empiricist school—that embraces the broad contours of a processive and relational worldview while making many of the very same criticisms of Whitehead and his more rationalistic followers. But I argue an even bolder thesis: process empiricism shares enough in common with Corrington’s perspective to be ‘emancipatorily reenacted’ as an iteration of ecstatic naturalism, albeit a unique iteration. Collectively, the five American religious empiricists featured in this essay—Henry Nelson Wieman, Bernard Loomer, William Dean, Nancy Frankenberry, and Donald Crosby—open up a conceptual space within the Whiteheadian tradition for developing a kind of ecstatically inflected, ordinally chastened, and unequivocally naturalistic process metaphysics.
Author: Demian Wheeler
References :
Brown, Delwin. 1994. Boundaries of Our Habitations: Tradition and Theological Construc¬tion (Albany: State University of New York Press).
Buchler, Justus. 1990. Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (ed. Kathleen Wallace, Armen Marsoobian, and Robert S. Corrington; Albany: State University of New York Press, 2nd edn).
Christian, David. 1991. ‘The Case for “Big History”’, Journal of World History 2.2: 223-38.
———. 2010. ‘The Return of Universal History’, History and Theory 49.4: 6-27. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2010.00557.x.
———. 2011. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Corrington, Robert S. 1989. 'Review of American Religious Empiricism and History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought, by William Dean', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy: New Series 3.3: 223-30.
———. 1992a. ‘Ecstatic Naturalism and the Transfiguration of the Good’, in Randolph Crump Miller (ed.), Empirical Theology: A Handbook (Birmingham: Religious Education Press): 203-21.
———. 1992b. Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press).
———. 1993. ‘Beyond Experience: Pragmatism and Nature’s God’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 14.2: 147-60.
———. 1994. Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
———. 1996. Nature’s Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield).
———. 1997a. Nature’s Religion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield).
———. 1997b. ‘A Unitarian Universalist Theology for the Twenty-First Century: Toward an Ecstatic Naturalism’, Voice 3.3: 1-9.
———. 1998. ‘Empirical Theology and Its Divergence from Process Thought’, in Roger A. Badham (ed.), Introduction to Christian Theology: Contemporary North American Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press): 166-79.
———. 2000. A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487644.
———. 2002. ‘My Passage from Panentheism to Pantheism’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 23.2: 129-53.
———. 2003. ‘Three Conventional Notions Ignore the Fullness of Nature’, Research News and Opportunities 3.10: 20-21.
———. 2007. ‘Deep Pantheism’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 1.4: 503-507.
———. 2009. ‘An Appraisal and Critique of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality and Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes’. Online: http://www.users.drew.edu/rcorring/publications.html.
———. 2010. ‘Evolution, Religion, and an Ecstatic Naturalism’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 31.2: 124-35. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ajt.0.0011.
———. 2013. Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham: Lexington Books).
Corrington, Robert S., and Leon J. Niemoczynski. 2009. ‘An Introduction to Ecstatic Naturalism: An Interview with Robert S. Corrington’, Kinesis 36.1: 64-94.
Crosby, Donald A. 1992. ‘God as Ground of Value: A Neo-Whiteheadian Revision’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 13.1: 37-52.
———. 1997. ‘Finite Is All Right! Confessions of a Slow Learner’, in Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (eds.), Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty (New York: Peter Lang): 357-82.
———. 2002a. ‘Metaphysics and Value’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 23.1: 38-51.
———. 2002b. A Religion of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 2007a. ‘A Case for Religion of Nature’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 1.4: 489-502.
———. 2007b. ‘Further Contributions to the Dialogue’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 1.4: 508-509.
———. 2007c. ‘Religious Naturalism’, in Chad Meister and Paul Copan (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge): 672-81.
———. 2008. Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 2010. ‘Emergentism, Perspectivism, and Divine Pathos’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 31.3: 196-206. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ ajt.2010.0007.
Dean, William. 1984. ‘Deconstruction and Process Theology’, The Journal of Religion 64.1: 1-19. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/487073.
———. 1986. American Religious Empiricism (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 1988. History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 1991. ‘Humanistic Historicism and Naturalistic Historicism’, in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International): 41-59.
———. 1994. The Religious Critic in American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 1999. ‘Historical Process Theology: A Field in a Map of Thought’, Process Studies 28.3-4: 255-66.
———. 2002. The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies (New York and London: Continuum).
Dorrien, Gary. 2003. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950, vol. 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press).
———. 2009. ‘The Crisis and Necessity of Liberal Theology’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 30.1: 3-23.
Frankenberry, Nancy. 1987. Religion and Radical Empiricism (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 1992. ‘Major Themes of Empirical Theology’, in Randolph Crump Miller (ed.), Empirical Theology: A Handbook (Birmingham: Religious Education Press): 36-56.
———. 1993. ‘Classical Theism, Panentheism, and Pantheism: On the Relation between God Construction and Gender Construction’, Zygon 28.1: 29-46. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.1993.tb01017.x.
Griffin, David Ray. 2000. Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany: State University of New York Press).
———. 2001. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Hartshorne, Charles. 1984. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press).
James, William. 1971. Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.).
———. 1978. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Keller, Catherine. 1986. From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press).
———. 2008. On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).
Lee, Bernard J. 1984. ‘The Two Process Theologies’, Theological Studies 45.2: 307-19. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004056398404500204.
Loomer, Bernard. 1987. ‘The Size of God’, in William Dean and Larry E. Axel (eds.), The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context (Macon: Mercer University Press): 20-51.
Meland, Bernard E. 1976. Fallible Forms and Symbols: Discourses on Method in a Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press).
Stone, Jerome A. 2008. Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative (Albany: State University of New York Press).
Suchocki, Marjorie. 1988. The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Albany: State University of New York Press).
Tillich, Paul. 1957. Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Wheeler, Demian. 2013. ‘Big History and the Size of God: Holistic Historicism as a Pathway to Religious Naturalism’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 34.3: 226-47.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press).
———. 1958. The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press).
———. 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne; New York: The Free Press; corrected edn).
Wieman, Henry Nelson. 1995. The Source of Human Good (Atlanta: Scholars Press).
Wieman, Henry Nelson, and Bernard Eugene Meland. 1936. American Philosophies of Religion (Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co.).
Wildman, Wesley J. 2006. ‘Ground-of-Being Theologies’, in Philip Clayton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 612-32. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279272.003.0037.
———. 2009. Science and Religious Anthropology: A Spiritually Evocative Naturalist Interpretation of Human Life (Farnham: Ashgate).