In this book, Huston Smith and David Ray Griffin propose religious philosophies to succeed the waning worldview of modernity. Huston Smith proposes the perennial philosophy or primordial tradition, and David Ray Griffin offers postmodern process theology. The ultimate issue debated is whether we should return to a traditional religious philosophy or seek a new never-before-articulated worldview. The debate covers the following issues: the relation of Christianity to other religions; the ultimate reality of a personal God in relation to a transpersonal absolute; the ultimate reality of time and progress; the problem of evil; the nature of immortality; the relation of humans to nature; the relation of science to theology; the relation of upward to downward causation; and the possibility of nonrelativistic criteria for deciding between competing worldviews.

This collection constitutes the first extended discussion of the relationship between Judaism and process thought. In the last half century the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne have become important sources for contemporary theological reflection. Recently, a number of Jewish thinkers have examined process thought as a potentially valuable resource for postmodern Jewish theology. This book brings together many Jewish thinkers who have pioneered this discussion. Jewish thinkers who have found process thought to be a useful framework for contemporary Jewish thought discuss issues that are primarily theological, such as God's transcendence and immanence, the problem of evil, the idea of revelation. Also included is a dialogue between Jewish and Christian thinkers on the appropriateness of process thought for their religious traditions. Critical reflection on the continuities and discontinuities between Judaism and the process model is also covered.

Postmodern philosophy is often dismissed as unintelligible, self-contradictory, and as a passing fad with no contribution to make to the problems faced by philosophers in our time. While this characterization may be true of the type of philosophy labeled postmodern in the 1980s and 1990s, David Ray Griffin argues that Alfred North Whitehead had formulated a radically different type of postmodern philosophy to which these criticisms do not apply. Griffin shows the power of Whitehead's philosophy in dealing with a range of contemporary issues—the mind-body relation, ecological ethics, truth as correspondence, the relation of time in physics to the (irreversible) time of our lives, and the reality of moral norms. He also defends a distinctive dimension of Whitehead's postmodernism, his theism, against various criticisms, including the charge that it is incompatible with relativity theory.

The Spirit of American Liberal Theology is an interpretation of the entire U.S. American tradition of liberal theology. A highly condensed and far-more-accessible summary of Gary Dorrien’s three-volume trilogy, The Making of American Liberal Theology (Westminster John Knox Press 2001, 2003, and 2006), Dorrien here presses the argument that the most abundant, diverse, and persistent tradition of liberal theology is the one that blossomed in the United States and is still refashioning itself. While discussions of English and German liberalism persist, new material includes expanded treatment of the Black social gospel, the Universalists, developments into early 2020s, and a robust expression of the author’s post-Hegelian liberal-liberationist perspective.

This book sorts out the confusion created by the use of the term “postmodern” in relation to widely divergent theological positions. Four different types of postmodern theology are distinguished in the preface: constructive, deconstructive, liberationist, and conservative. Two forms of each type are discussed in the book. Writing from a constructive, postmodern perspective, the authors enter into dialogue with the deconstructive postmodernism of Mark C. Taylor and Jean-François Lyotard, with the liberationist postmodernism of Harvey Cox and Cornel West, and with the conservative postmodernism of George William Rutler and John Paul II.

Trajectory of the Twenty-first Century explores what many prophets of the twentieth century, such as Oswald Spengler, Paul Tillich, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and others, have predicted would transpire in the current century. Their vision included an out-of-control technological system and a return to religious sentiment that will ultimately undermine the system to which it is reacting. This book aims to accurately present their positions and draw certain logical conclusions from them that pertain to the course of history in our time. The book's theme argues that modernity is a secularized version of millennial Christianity, which reaches its fullest development in the twenty-first century and will regress into what Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev called "the new Middle Ages" or a new religious period. This will mean the twilight of modern technological society, as its values of rationalism give way to a postrationalist society. Ironically, decline will come through further technological advance. Omnicide threatens through religious world war driven by transcendent values and modern weaponry. Jihadist thinking and posthumanist technology both establish the omnicidal mentatlity. New technologies such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence created under millennial inspiration to reach for immortality could potentially bring an end to the human species either through a slow, steady obsolescence or through environmental catastrophe. The titanic forces of technological progress and regress are on a direct collision course in the twenty-first century.

Sixty philosophers' memoirs revealing how they became philosophers and dedicated their lives to the pursuit of wisdom.

Archetypal Process is a pioneering study linking the ideas of process philosophy, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, with the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung and James Hillman. This is the first work to examine the interconnections of these two modes of thought. Archetypal Process examines the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground archetypal psychology in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought, and finally, it adds a much-needed feminist perspective to the debate.

In this book Griffin responds to critiques of his earlier work--God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy--and discusses ways in which his position has changed in the intervening years. In so doing, he examines the problem of evil, theodicy, and philosophical theology, and contrasts traditional theism and process theism with regard to the question of omnipotence.

In this insightful,beautifully written work, one of America's most important feminist ecological thinkers reflects on the roots of modernity in Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Spretnak argues that an "ecological postmodern" ethos is emerging in the 1990s. the creative cosmos, and the complex sense of place." Both a sharp critique and a graceful performance of the art of the possible, The Resurgence of the Real changes the way we think about living in the modern world.