David Griffin

Although attempts to explain religious experience in terms of brain processes usually presuppose the identification of scientific naturalism with the sensationist, atheistic, materialist version of naturalism (naturalismsam), this version is inadequate for science, and human experience more generally, for numerous reasons. An alternative version, based on panexperientialism, panentheism, and a prehensive doctrine of perception (naturalismppp), not only avoids those problems but also allows for religious experience understood as the soul's direct experience of a Holy Reality.

This book takes a genuinely new spiritual stance reflecting the emergence of a post-modern science and differing from the relativistic nihilism that calls itself postmodern but is really modernism extended to its limit. Based on a direct experience of reality as divine, this postmodern spirituality transcends modernity's individualism and patriarchy, its forced choices between dualism and materialism, anthropocentrism and relativism, supernaturalism and atheism, intolerance and nihilism. Bringing moral and ethical values back into rational discourse, this book provides a critique of various aspects of modern society--political, economic, social, agricultural, and technological aspects. This criticism, informed by the postmodern worldview, points toward a more satisfying form of personal existence and a sustainable form of global order.

Although Ian Barbour endorses process organicism in Issues in Science and Religion, his rhetoric against vitalism and dualism makes his discussion of life, mind, and the part-whole relationship sound like relational emergentism and hence like a denial of process philosophy's nondualistic interactionism. Also his rhetoric against a God of the gaps seems to exclude the God-shaped hole in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. A more consistent articulation of Whitehead's postmodern position would lead to greater adequacy and consistency on these issues, and perhaps also to a more radically postmodern view of science—a view which Whitehead himself only sometimes suggested.

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.