Greetings, WesleyNexus Colleagues:
We are happy to say that the first Annual Kent Weaver Lecture on October 29, 2022 was a big success. Over 60 people attended the presentation “Ordinary Science, Ordinary Faith” by Dr. William Phillips, Nobel Prize winner in physics. These are some of the “take-aways” provided by members of our Board: “For me it was the culmination of the presentation when Dr. Phillips identified the crucial aspect of commitment on our faith journey as the Call of God, to which we graciously respond, even when we don’t have all the answers. As Professor John Cobb has put it: “If now we understand God fundamentally as One Who Calls us to ever-greater love, life, and freedom, this does not exclude the possibility that God is also in some important sense the Ground of all our becoming.” In a larger sense, the Holy One is the immanent-transcendent Ground of life and creativity who calls us ever forward in and through the ordinary events of daily life and the often terrifying occurrences of human history. – Maynard Moore.
From Dr. Phillip’s presentation, three points stand out in my mind. Most prominent is the understanding that truth comes from more than scientific research. The experiments that are performed in labs certainly discover how the universe behaves but religion, the domain of Christian faith, provides truth of a different kind, the why of it all. Secondly, he emphasized the Wesleyan quadrilateral which affirms four sources of insight for faith. Scripture of course, and tradition, but also reason and experience work together to form four legs on which the faith can firmly stand. Lastly, affirming that declaration of Micah 6:8, one of his favorite passages from the Old Testament, Dr Phillips highlighted the importance of living the faith and not just believing propositions about the faith. For him, this living the faith makes him an ordinary Christian. If only we could all be so ordinary. – Rick Barr
Contents:
IRAS Webinar: Spiritual Experience: For REAL — For YOU — For the FUTURE with Dr. Calvin Chatlos
IRAS Webinar: Why is Cross-Cultural Conversation (CCC) Crucial in Our Time: A New Way of Learning with Dr. Anindita N. Balslev
Continuity and Simplification in Biological Evolution by Sy Garte
The Beauty at the Heart of a ‘Spooky’ Mystery by John Horgan
Video: Consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity: Doctor Raymond Tallis on the mind-body problem
The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description by Thomas Lewton
Nurturing a Life of Attentiveness by Janel Curry
On Being a Hero of your own Life by Jay McDaniel
Thanks continue to go out to our generous contributors. This is the time of year when (a) you make most of your philanthropic decisions, and (b) we have expended the funds in our budget for promotion and technical support. This is the combination of circumstances that call for you to join us with a donation that will support our continuing work. We encourage you to share comments, articles and insights that will help us all weather these difficult times.
Blessings,
Maynard Moore, Rick Barr and the rest of the WesleyNexus team
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First Annual Kent Weaver Lecture – October 29, 2022 – Dr. William D. Phillips, Nobel Laureate
Kent Weaver was born to a Methodist couple, baptized as an infant at Metropolitan Memorial Methodist Church in Washington DC, participated in Methodist Youth programs, enrolled and graduated from a Methodist College, and served as a leader in virtually every capacity for some forty years in his Methodist congregations in the BWCUMC. Moreover, he served as Treasurer of the Wesley Nexus organization since its incorporation until his death in May 2020. In his honor, the WesleyNexus board collaborated with the congregation at National United Methodist Church to establish an annual lectureship to perpetuate his commitments.
The lecture by Dr. William D. Phillips, Nobel Laureate in Physics and a long time director at the National Institute on Standards and Technology, was opened to all and meant for an inquisitive lay audience.
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Discovery and Faith
https :// www.discoveryandfaith.org/
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Webinars: Two webinars in November
(1) Spiritual Experience: For REAL — For YOU — For the FUTURE with Dr. Calvin Chatlos
November 14, 2022, at 4:00 PM Central time, 5:00 PM Eastern time
Presentation Overview:
Spiritual experience is for REAL. A science-based explanation of our capacity for real spiritual experience will be explained along with a specific process for its promotion. The important role of experiences of worth and dignity will be highlighted. It is for YOU. The capacity for spiritual experience is wired into our brains and available to all open to it. Details about the personal process available for its access, a description of its characteristics and opportunities, and an explanation for why it cannot be experienced initially by reason and understanding will be reviewed. It is critical for our FUTURE. Einstein’s quote, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” now has a response. The creativity that opens with spiritual experience provides an incredibly powerful new way of thinking. This is a webinar not to be missed!
Presentation Background:
Dr. Chatlos is a Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, Board Certified in Child & Adolescent and Addiction Psychiatry, where he incorporates spiritual principles in recovery from addiction and trauma. He graduated from Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He received specialty training at Montefiore Hospital, New York University-Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He is a graduate of the Humanist Institute, NYC, a long-time member of the Society for Ethical Culture, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County (UUCMC), and a board member of the United Religions Initiative (URI) Cooperation Circle of the Monmouth Center for World Religions and Ethical Thought (MCWRET), and a Council member of IRAS. He is the developer of the “Human Faith Project,” focused on the role of self-worth and dignity in opening a universal core of religious/spiritual experience and its empowerment of creativity. He is now engaged explicitly in research exploring the nature of spiritual experience and lives in New Jersey with his two children, Taylor and Liviya.
The IRAS webinar is FREE, but registration is required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9Cs1cozGTx24aXkCgsVkzA
(2) November 30: Why is Cross-Cultural Conversation (CCC) Crucial in Our Time: A New Way of Learning with Dr. Anindita N. Balslev, an independent scholar based in India & Denmark, recently awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship and Respondent: Dr. Jeffery Long, the Carl W. Zeigler Professor of Religion, Philosophy and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.
November 30, 2022, at 4:00 pm Central time, 5:00 Eastern time
Presentation Overview:
Dr. Balslev begins her presentation with the title question, focusing on concerns both national and international. She outlines why the question is important for individuals as well as for public policy. She frames her argument in terms of personal identify that all thinking persons must answer for themselves, pointing out that one’s answer is crucial both for mental health and cultural understanding. She addresses the crisis in our time in terms of the unequal distribution of technology and accessibility to emerging possibilities for individuals, communities and nations. She then makes the point that collaboration for meeting the many issues we face depends on cross-cultural conversation if we are avoid sinking back into new forms of tribalism. And finally she sums up her position with the claim that science and religion – and the dialogue between the advocates for each – must be at the heart of this cross-cultural conversation if we are to derive full benefits of the emerging technologies for the well-being of all people on the planet.
Presenter Background:
Dr. Balslev is engaged in research in consciousness studies and is the founder of the Forum on CCC. She directs the CCC program that focuses especially on the dialogue between science and religion, the meeting of cultures and encounters between world religions. The international conference on CCC that Dr. Balslev has organized in association with national institutes in India have generated significant institutional impacts. Dr. Balslev works with academic departments at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University, and is the recipient of fellowships from the French and Danish governments, the Danish Council on the Humanities, the Freja Project and the Jawaharlal Nehru Foundation. She is a founding member of ISSR. Among her publications are articles on Indian consciousness, a Study of Time in Indian Philosophy, and cross-cultural self-image. She was a featured presenter at the 2015 Parliament of World Religions.
The IRAS webinar is FREE, but registration is required
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9Cs1cozGTx24aXkCgsVkzA
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The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS)
IRAS is an international society of learners and thinkers, natural and social scientists, philosophers, theologians and people from many other backgrounds and professions. IRAS cultivates a community of informed and respectful inquiry and dialogue at the intersections of science with religion, spirituality and philosophy in service of global, societal and personal well-being.
IRAS Webinar Series
For 65 years, The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) has held summer Conferences on Star Island, off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Due to the pandemic, we had to postpone our 2020 Star Island conference until the summer of 2021. In order to continue to engage with IRAS themes and the IRAS community, with Star Island’s generous support, we launched a live webinar series: Science, Religion, & Society.
https://www.iras.org/webinar-series.html
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Continuity and Simplification in Biological Evolution by Sy Garte
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjCPA1eGU8k
Diving Deeper is a monthly series of Zoom discussions for ASA members and their friends to think more deeply about an article or book review published in the ASA journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. (This video has a personal, conversational touch which is quite helpful.)
Article
Summary
The principle of continuity in evolution is often violated by discontinuous saltations leading to “punctuations” in evolutionary history. Highly accurate cellular replication fidelity is a requirement for biological evolution. In previous work, I have used a statistical theoretical model to demonstrate discontinuity in the evolution of high replication fidelity. Depending on the granularity of approach, both a continuous and a saltational view of evolutionary history are consistent with a scientific worldview of creation, and with the concept of simplification in biology as articulated by Emily Boring et al. The apparent contradiction between the complexity of biological systems with the idea of evolutionary simplification can be resolved by considering the globally simplifying selection of single systems and the local evolution of increasing system complexity. Explanations of thresholds and discontinuities during evolution might require the inclusion of paradigms such as teleology and agency in biological science, with theological implications.
https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2022/PSCF9-22Garte.pdf
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The Beauty at the Heart of a ‘Spooky’ Mystery by John Horgan
Quantum entanglement seems like it shouldn’t be possible, but experiments from 2022 Nobel Prize winners based on John Bell’s work tell us otherwise.
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Video: Consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity: Doctor Raymond Tallis on the mind-body problem
Professor Tallis—a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic, retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist—discusses the relationship between mind and brain, as well as the big questions about the nature of reality.
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The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description by Thomas Lewton
Quantum field theory depicts discrete particles as excitations in continuous fields that stretch across space and time. It’s the most successful physical theory ever discovered, and it encompasses the Standard Model of particle physics — the impressively accurate equation governing all known elementary particles.
“Fractons do not fit into this framework. So my take is that the framework is incomplete,” said Seiberg.
There are other good reasons for thinking that quantum field theory is incomplete — for one thing, it so far fails to account for the force of gravity. If they can figure out how to describe fractons in the quantum field theory framework, Seiberg and other theorists foresee new clues toward a viable quantum gravity theory.
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Nurturing a Life of Attentiveness by Janel Curry
Nel Noddings, in her ground-breaking work Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, says that all caring involves engrossment. She says that the danger in caring is that it might gradually be transformed into abstract problem solving—caring for the world rather than Bob, for example. When that happens, the shift of focus goes from the cared-for to an abstract problem. You cannot be attentive to the entire world, and thus you cannot learn skills of care. The skills are learned at the level at which we form relationships.
Noddings also argues that caring—being attentive—does not create boredom with ordinary life. The ordinariness of life enhances receptivity and attentiveness. We observe the nuances of change and build our skills of observation of patterns, producing a deep joy and connection. Noddings says that these experiences of wholeness should serve as goal posts in life. She encourages us to build on the best picture of ourselves caring and being cared for, the result of nurturing our skills of attentiveness.
https://godandnature.asa3.org/curry-attentiveness.html
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On Being a Hero of your own Life by Jay McDaniel
tiny moments of love and laughter, heartbreak and deceit are the building blocks of existence
Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses and Whitehead’s philosophy of experience
James Joyce’s Ulysses invites us to be faithful to the “actual occasions of experience” of everyday life, replacing the epic with the ordinary. In reading the book, we are invited to find heroism, not in epic quests of good versus evil undertaken by superheroes, but in the concreteness of daily life experience, subjective and objective, as undergone by ordinary, unremarkable people, like you and me. The grandeur, if anywhere, is in how we live the concreteness.
Joyce is also known for his attention to the way we actually think: not in complete sentences with conventional punctuation, but in a stream of consciousness with contours, false starts, and trajectories of its own. And for his appreciation of internal wandering, exploring, experimenting. Ulysses itself is a potpourri of many different styles, each unique. There is not just “one way” to be in the world. There are, as it were, many ultimates.
And there’s a physicality to Joyce, too. He speaks of memories and farts, love and urination, without deeming one more fundamental than the other. We are invited to be faithful to multiplicity and to experience itself. The first phase in concrescence, says Whitehead, is “a multiplicity of simple physical feelings” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 236/ 362). For Whitehead, multiplicity is one of the eight categories of existence, apart from which existence cannot be understood.
Additionally, Whitehead’s ontological principle is the idea that the particularities of existence – the actual occasions of experience, in his words – are more fundamental than the abstractions by which they are understood, in the sense that the actual occasions, not the abstractions, have the agency. Abstraction don’t actualize possibilities, only momentary occasions do so.
James Joyce’s Ulysses gives life to Whitehead’s idea. His novel presents the multiplicity of daily life in Dublin, 1904, as experienced by Dubliner Leopold Bloom, his friends Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, his wife Molly. Many more people know the title of the book than have read it, and many more have tried to complete it than have completed it.
Our own lives are just as interesting as those of the traditional heroes. And as interesting as Joyce’s novel.
https://www.openhorizons.org/on-being-a-hero-of-your-own-life-notes-on-james-joyce-and-whitehead.html?fbclid=IwAR1RuAswW82DoTGt0-02Fl4mibRj_Vr48MHJR007Pv4E0OaRzbjd25W_uMc