Upcoming Events
AAR Annual Meeting
San Diego, CA
November 23-26, 2019
I will be giving a paper in the Open and Relational Theologies Unit responding to the prompt: “What kind ‘God’ is most worthy of worship.”
Abstract
Why does God exist and through what? This question should be at the heart of considerations as to what “kind” of God is worthy of worship, as well as considerations as to what worship involves. Perhaps God's existence is a brute fact and without reason? Perhaps God’s existence is logically necessary? Or, perhaps God’s power is the reason for God’s existence? Each of these answers fails to ground a God worthy of worship. They also fail to illuminate what worship is. This paper argues that worthiness of worship is only to be assigned to a God whose very Value is the Divine “reason.” As such, Value is also the reason for the world, human existence, and human purpose as worshipful begins. The axiological foundations of God and the world constitute worship as “ontological gratitude”—a gratefulness for existence—which will manifest itself in a value-creative life. To this end, my sources include: John Leslie, Keith Ward, Alfred North Whitehead, Nicholas Rescher, A.C. Ewing, and others
Upcoming Projects
I’m currently writing my dissertation, as well as working on two edited volumes.
My dissertation investigates the nature of ultimacy and explanation in the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Keith Ward and John Leslie, particularly as it relates to the necessary status of, and relationship between, Mind and Value in the Universe. Key problems of exploration include: why there is anything at all, the place of Mind and Value in the philosophical tradition, the nature, locus and efficacy of the Possible, the mystery of Intelligibility and Mathematical Rationality, and the weight of objective Aesthetic, Moral and Ethical Values in the cosmos. What emerges is an integrative metaphysical scheme wherein Mind, Value and the Cosmos are mutually immanent and irreducible domains of a system of Ultimate Relationality. My tentative title is: “The Integrative Coherence of Infinite Mind: Existence, Experience and the Metaphysics of Relation.”
Alongside Roland Faber and Michael Halewood, I'm editing a forthcoming book from Lexington titled Propositions in the Making: Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory. Originating from a confernce at Claremont School of Theolog in 2016, the book assembles creative interdisciplinary applications of Whitehead's understanding of propositions as "lures for feeling."
I'm also integrating and editing a volume of fantastic isolated writings of Roland Faber into a book tentatively titled Depths As Yet Unspoken: Whiteheadian Excursions in Mysticism, Multiplicity and Divinity. The book is under review at Wipf & Stock.
Stay tuned.