Sentences with phrase «process thinkers»

Process thinkers are working on fleshing out the full political implications of that vision.

Fully aware that language shapes reality, the very way in which process thinkers use the word «shape» instead of «determine» is deliberate, attempting to show that while partially molded by the totality of the environment, any entity is also an instance of creativity.

Some process thinkers have used the technical Whiteheadian definition in analyzing human societies.

Process thinkers, on the other hand, have focused on the philosophical dimensions and foundations of culture.

Since our interrelatedness and interdependence is not just local but global, process thinkers have been in the forefront in the advocacy of global awareness and world history, human and non-human.

Process thinkers encourage sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians, and scholars in other disciplines to take a more holistic approach, taking into account and doing justice to how human organisms interact not only with the human environment of their cultures and societies but also the non-human environments of which they are a part that are throbbing with life, energy, and creativity.

A major area of interest to process thinkers, for example, are the myths, images, models, paradigms, and rituals around which people organize their experiences and through which they find significance and meaning for their lives.

The reverse is also true: some process thinkers have had an impact on systems theory.

Indeed, some process thinkers have been influenced by systems theory.

The writings of Whitehead, Hartshorne, Williams, and other process thinkers are replete with a sense of the tragic character of all existence, possibilities never actualized, perpetual perishing, resistance to the possibility of newness of life and the need to share and be present to each other's lived experiences, the ambiguity of all instances of creative freedom that can always be used for good or ill.

Thus, quite typically, discussions of «societies» by process thinkers are quite different from common sense usage of the word as well as sociological definitions, and usually do not refer to human societies.

Even as I claim that the relational conception of power is egalitarian, I would be remiss not to mention that only a few process thinkers deal directly with the issue of equality and justice.

process thinkers do not want to lose the positive gains of our heightened sense of individuality.

Inadvertently, those process thinkers who think of the Jesus - event as the common element of form that is the defining characteristic of the society called the church can be interpreted to depict the Jesus - event as having agency, as the mind of the organism, in a manner of speaking, that subsumes the individuality of it members.

While process thinkers are in sympathy with these critiques, their focus is different.

The purpose of the preceding discussion has been to set the stage and clarify the definition and importance of community for process thinkers.

To quote from Bernard Meland, one of the most influential of the empirical process thinkers, language is inadequate to convey the «depth and surplusage of experience» (FFS 48) to which theology attends.

Process thinkers can talk about richness, harmony, depth of satisfaction, or even happiness.

Speculative process thinkers, therefore, attempt to develop provisional, general schemes of ideas in terms of which all else can be adequately interpreted.

All this is familiar to process thinkers.

In many instances the differences between process thinkers are grounded in personal history, personal disposition, and the interests of a particular theologian at a particular moment.

In contrast, other speculative process thinkers (in addition to the rationalists whom we shall describe in a moment) hold that «Christian process theology» is a misnomer for much of what is done by their speculative colleagues, as valuable as this work may be.

In other books, those of us who are process thinkers have endeavored to work out a theological or religious position, an interpretation of Christian prayer and worship, and a moral attitude, which will take account of what we have learned but which will also be in genuine continuity with the past we have inherited.

36Many process thinkers attribute this intermediary role to God's consequent nature, because otherwise, in their opinion, no envisagement and / or no provision of specific initial aims would be possible (e.g., Christian, IWM 306 - 308; John Lansing, «The «Natures» of Whitehead's God,» Process Studio 3 [1973), 143 - 152, at 147 - 148; Suchocki, MGWG 243 - 245; Lewis S. Ford, «When Did Whitehead Conceive God to be Personal?»

Empirical, speculative, and rationalistic process thinkers differ, we suspect, on the nature of this dimension of experience, the proper ways of analyzing it, and in their conclusions concerning what can be accomplished by referring to this level of experience While all turn to this depth dimension of life, it is not clear that the «deep empiricism» of the rationalists, which yields universal and necessary truths, is the same as that form of «radical empiricism» whose adherents focus on the particular and the contingent.

They may be pejorative for process thinkers, but not necessarily for the rest of us.

My impression is that this is a very difficult point for process thinkers to see, as is a second point linked to it that also emerges in what I have quoted from Muray above.

Evangelicals are likely to find it too general to be helpful while process thinkers will hesitate to accept it as a description if there is no recognition of the metaphysical necessity of both diversity and unity.

Dr. Culp describes several discussions between evangelical theologians and process thinkers.

Both process thinkers and evangelicals agree that God is love and active love in the world.

For Whitehead, and process thinkers generally, existence is dynamic, and there is no aspect of things which is free from change.

Searching for an Adequate God has made important advances in the dialogue between process thinkers and the Open view of God.

Time is odd as a spatial dimension, because it is supposed to display features of asymmetry not dependent on the orientation of the observer, but the process thinkers can not figure out in what the asymmetry is supposed to consist if determinism is true.

I wonder, actually, just how process thinkers such as Muray will escape this point.

I do not find this so strongly in other process thinkers, and insofar as Muray will not be more specific than that the criterion for reconstituting a tradition is «whatever contributes to the enhancement of relationality and creativity that are true of the fundamental character of reality itself» (93), I do not think he will much like the basis of Hauerwas» critique, namely the stories of the history of Israel and Jesus as they continue to be remembered and enacted in the Christian church.

Perhaps for process thinkers it will lead to something like this as well.4

For frequently he refers to «process thought» which has «basic tenets» (88), or to «process thinkers» (89), or «a process understanding» (91).

I shall assume that the process thinkers are right in holding that an adequate metaphysics of time must recognize dynamic becoming in nature as well as in human consciousness.

But, the Wesleyan / Methodist tradition has also supplied occasions for discussions between evangelicals and process thinkers.5 Because Wesleyan theology is neither exclusively liberal nor evangelical, this discussion has revolved around the more specific relationship between Wesleyan theology and process theology.

Except for John Stuart Mill and Charles Hartshorne, process thinkers have not written much about ethics.

But none of these concepts correspond to the sense in which Whitehead and other process thinkers see the role of final causation in the world.

It is the process thinkers, however, who have developed the larger framework in which to perceive this unity of mind and body — a unity validated in a limited, concrete way by the actual birth process but more inclusively by any act of the creative imagination.

Process thinkers have offered a theology of nature — a topic sadly neglected in neo-orthodoxy, existentialism, and most other twentieth - century schools of Christian thought — and it would strongly support an environmental ethic.28

When process thinkers refer to the «classical view of God,» they normally» have in mind the doctrine (s) of God as developed in the Augustinian - Thomistic tradition.

These particular «traditional» theologians agree with the process thinkers that a creature's decisions can not be free if God is the cause of those decisions.

So far as I am aware, process thinkers have not critiqued the traditional Islamic doctrines of God; but the process arguments would seem to be far more devastating when applied, say; to the «occasionalism» of al - Ashari's doctrine of divine power than to the Augustinian or Thomistic notions of God.

His primary commitments, however, are to Aquinas, whom he defends not only against modern criticism of the sort made by process thinkers but also against the older criticisms of Medieval Jewish, Muslim and even other Christian thinkers (e.g., Duns Scotus).

While it is easiest to grasp the prius of creativity - esse in the human case, a process metaphysics sees at least a faint glimmer of subjectivity (which for process thinkers does not imply consciousness!)

When this persuasion takes the form of love (as process thinkers assume it normally does), I would argue that it is the supremely valuable form of acting.

In Section 1, I noted the closely related argument, common among process thinkers, that the separation of God and creativity results in improvements in theodicy because it establishes a radical freedom for the creatures, where God does not create the creatures» particular decisions.