Open theism represents an important mediating position between more traditional or evangelical theology and process thought. But open theists have in general failed to engage panentheism. The increasingly significant role of panentheism not only in process thought but now across the theological spectrum—including among evangelical thinkers—suggests a new mediating position, open panentheism. Its panentheistic themes allow this new constructive theology to draw more deeply from process sources than most open theists do. At the same time, along with more traditional theologies, it affirms a free creation by God ex nihilo, and hence the free self-limitation (kenosis) of God in the creative act.

Though it is frequently pointed out that Whitehead’s process philosophy is a hermeneutic philosophy, the author makes the additional claims that the philosophical hermenutics of the 19th and 20th centuries are frequently process philosophies. This is especially true of Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation theory, whichdescribes the ego as engaged in an unending transformative dialectic process with its environment. This insight, coupled with Ricoeur’s insistence on the efficacy of a pre-linguistic reality upon experience, makes him a provocative conversation partner for Whiteheadians and uncovers the possibility of a process metaphysic arising out of the “subjectivist” programs of phenomenology and linguistic analysis.

Like process theism, Christian theology affirms the immanence of God in the world and of the world in God. Unlike process theism, it also affirms the ontological priority of God over the world. As a result, Christian theologians will object to describing God’s relation to the world by analogy with the mind’s relation to the body or in terms of whole-part relations. In Christian history, the God-world relation has been more often described in terms of “participation.” The world is said to participate in God, keeping in mind that this language is highly metaphorical. The idea of participation is a development of themes enunciated by Plato and Aristotle, but adapted by Christian theologians to trinitarian ends. The created world participates in God by reflecting the trinitarian life of identity and difference. This establishes an organic and internal relation between God and the world.

This paper attempts to reinterpret the idea of minjung messiah, a major doctrine of Korean minjung theology, in order to reveal its nondualistic understanding of Christian eschatology, by using process non-substantialist metaphysics. In a dialogue with process panentheism, minjung theology gets philosophical languages to articulate its organic ideas of the relationships between historical liberation and eschatological salvation, minjung’s self-transcendence and divine providence, and history and the Kingdom of God.

Using the lenses of both biblical and process theology, this essay explores the ways in which sacrament and church are inextricably bound with one another. By paying special attention to the seriousness with which Whiteheadian thought takes events in space and time, the essay develops a sacramentally focused ecclesiology that is radically embodied in the realm of occasions.

A number of years ago we argued that Hartshorne’s psychicalism and his doctrine of divine memory are incompatible with contemporary big bang cosmology. Theodore Walker has responded to our objection by arguing that our understanding of psychicalism is flawed and that Hartshorne’s metaphysics has the resources for accommodating what the big bang theory says about the origin and fate of the universe. In the present article we attempt to show that Walker’s defense of Hartshorne fails.

Isabelle Stengers’ work on Whitehead is amongst the most important in Europe today. The contributors here—Isabella Palin, Stephen Meyers, DidierDebaise, and Andrew Goffey—offer a range of perspectives on Stengers’ effort to “think with” Whitehead. Stengers’ detailed response is included.

This essay presents what is at stake in Marcuse’s reference to Whitehead’s theory of eternal objects in chapter eight of One-Dimensional Man. There is afecund philosophical affinity between Marcuse’s Critical Theory and Whitehead’s metaphysical alternative. The introduction parses Marcuse’s citation of Whitehead, explaining how the Critical Theory employs eternal objects. Thus a correlate aim of this essay is to provide a charitable reading of Marcuse with attention to Whiteheadian undercurrents and concerns.

This essay presents some points of dialogue between process thinking and post-structuralism, particularly in light of the metaphysical cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead and the post-structuralist philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. This dialogue facilitates the emergence of a cosmologicalpostmodernism. Through the creation of concepts that situate the human within the networks, processes, and mutually constitutive relations of the cosmos, cosmological postmodernism re-envisions the worldview of modernity and overcomes its reification and dichotomization of the human and the world. Four concepts that Whitehead, Deleuze, and Derrida contribute to a cosmological postmodernism include “event,” “creativity,” “rhizome,” and “chaosmos.”

Whitehead was critical with respect to Poincaré’s conventionalism. However, Whitehead stood closer to Poincaré than Bertrand Russell when Russellinvoked Poincaré’s conventionalism to highlight that the choice between Arthur Eddington’s orthodox interpretation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity on the one hand, and Whitehead’s alternative interpretation on the other, is not a matter of empirical fact, but a matter of convention. Whitehead shared two of the premises of Poincaré’s conventionalism: the physics-independence of geometry, and the choice of a physical geometry amongst geometries of constant curvature. This contributed significantly to his philosophical critique of Einstein, who held that the geometry of space-time depends on the physical distribution of matter, and that the non-homogeneity of this distribution (e.g., at the scale of the solar system) implies that the appropriate physical geometry is variably curved. Russell’s conventionalism, contrary to Whitehead’s view, did not take Poincaré’s premises into account, was shared by the logical positivists, and led to a philosophical defense of Einstein.

There is a good deal linking Whitehead’s and Emerson’s deepest in-tuitions, starting with their shared emphasis on intuition and flux—and despite the fact thatin sharp contrast with Whitehead, Emerson carefully avoided anything resembling a metaphysical system. Following Stengers, I distinguish between Whitehead’s “scheme” and his “intentionality”: he is “less the author of the scheme and of the concepts he articulates than he is obliged by them, compelled by them, in a process of empirical experimentation and verification which has about it something of the experience of a trance because the thought in question is taken, captured, by a becoming—something about to be.” The bulk of the essay concerns the central role played by “interstitial wagers” of this sort in Whitehead’s contribution to what he termed “the romance of human thought.”

In this article, I claim that Stengers’ interpretation of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy is organized around the concept of “infection.” In focusing on thisconcept it becomes possible to link process concepts such as “societies,” “environment,” and “historical trajectories” in a real philosophy of life. I have analyzedthe singularity of such a philosophy that Stengers calls a “culture of interstices” and its epistemological dimensions.

The way in which Stengers thinks “with” rather than “about” Whitehead is explained through an examination of the transformational function of speculative propositions. The article then investigates the significance of the recurrent theme of “coherence” throughout Whitehead’s philosophical and socio-organizational writings. This theme guides and unifies his thought through its various conceptual adventures.

In “Non-Rigid Forms” I characterized possibilities as indefinite forms, in contrast to the definite forms (eternal objects) of actualities. This did not do justice to the atemporality of eternal objects. Indefinite forms ought to be construed as dense clusters of eternal objects. By progressive definition God specifies relevantpossibilities to the occasion, which determines one to become actual.

Isabelle Stengers’ magnificent book, Penser avec Whitehead, shows that to respond to the challenge posed by our epoch is to “think with” Whitehead in aconstructive and experimental process of reclaiming experience. “Experimentation” is a key term in Stengers’s reading, one which has a crucial role in articulating the stakes of “thinking with.” By looking at the diverse registers across which the notion of experimentation play in Penser avec Whitehead, this paper draws attention to the conceptual politics of “thinking with.”

Four different contributions about my Penser avec Whitehead are a bit like four different chemical tests, helping me to understand better how my proposition may activate interest and connections, but also, and more surprisingly, enlightening me about “how” I myself have inherited from Whitehead’s philosophicaladventure. This answer weaves threads from Debaise, Goffey, Meyer, and Palin together with this very special gift I owe them all: the recognition that if I felt itneeded to resist the notion of a Whiteheadian “conception of a creative world,” it is because to me “thinking with Whitehead” is not thinking about the world,rather reclaiming the kind of trust that thinking requires.