• Applying Integrative Metatheories to the Most Pressing Challenges of Our Time | Robb Smith & Brendan Graham Dempsey

    Process Explorations

    In this session of Process Explorations, Robb Smith and Brendan Graham Dempsey introduce the concept of integrative metatheories and share how the Institute of Applied Metatheory's initiatives leverage these theories to promote civilizational transformation. Initiatives range from understanding the metacrisis and artificial intelligence to reshaping the educational landscape and worldviews—all utilizing the unique insights of integrative metatheory to effect meaningful change.

    Free
  • Reframing Leadership from Complexity and Process-Relational Perspectives | Erin Hawkins

    Process Explorations

    This presentation is an inquiry into how process-relational perspectives of leadership require changing the invisible structures that shape how groups make decisions, create together, learn collectively, and navigate uncertainty. Erin Hawkins invites participants to reconsider not just how we understand leadership, but how we organize for transformation in an age of polycrisis.

    Free
  • Multi/Race/Less/Ness: A Responsible Process Post-Race Metaphysic in Sketch | Jon Ivan Gill

    Process Explorations

    In Multi/Race/Less/Ness, Jon Ivan Gill challenges us to take the next step and abolish the very category of race. With seemingly immutable notions of race still baked into our societies at the level of law and legislation, process philosophy can remind us that being, and how we define it, is dynamic and subject to change. If race as a category is impermanent, then it can be undone. This talk will focus specifically on the metaphysical scheme of multi/race/less/ness and how Gill proposes it offers a way out of the hierarchies of racial identification.

    Free
  • Relational Leadership in Such a Time as This | Mary Elizabeth Moore

    Process Explorations

    This session will be an exploration of leadership in the context of hyper-fear, aggression, and combative speech and action. What kind of leadership is required in such a context? What potential does process relational leadership have to address the aches in our ecological home and human family? The session will explore these questions and identify significant possibilities through a presentation by Mary Elizabeth Moore and interviews with others, followed by a "think tank" discussion with all participants.

    Free
  • Sacred Secularity | Bruce Alderman

    Process Explorations

    The difference between the sacred and the secular may be more a matter of how than what—specifically, the quality of time and the depth of relation we bring to whatever is before us. Inspired by a recent dream about sacred secularity, Bruce Alderman explores what Raimon Panikkar's tempiternity, Martin Buber's hyphen, and Alfred North Whitehead's process-relational vision might reveal when we attend not only to the between but to the when—and what shifts when both deepen together.

    Free
  • Experiences of Presence | Ann Taves

    Process Explorations

    When people claim to have experienced the presence of a dead loved one, a deity, or other spiritual entity, the way they knew the presence was there can vary widely, regardless of who they thought was present. Some say that they just knew the presence was there. Others say they saw, heard, or felt the touch of the presence. Others explain that the entity signaled its presence by arousing unusual feelings or by causing unusual things to happen. As part of a research team that attempted to understand such experiences scientifically, Ann Taves and a collaborator developed a typology of presence experiences designed to enable researchers to distinguish the different types of experiences that they wanted to explain. In this talk, Taves will explain the typology using experiences drawn from her research to illustrate and discuss how considering experiences as events can help us to understand the factors that interact to produce experiences of known presences.

  • Splash Ink Painting and the Intimidation of Permanence | Kevin Yeh

    Process Explorations

    In this SPARKS Exchange Kevin Yeh 葉浩白 will perform a live demonstration of the Yeh Splash Ink style and explore the concepts of perceived permanence and taking the first step in a journey. Kevin is a third-generation Chinese splash ink artist continuing a family lineage that began with his grandfather. The session will begin with Kevin's demonstration of horse painting, followed by an dialogue with Jay McDaniel to draw connections with process philosophy themes, and conclude with a participatory activity led by Kaeti MacNeil where attendees can breathe along with Kevin's brushstrokes.

  • Ten Differences Between Traditional Systematic Theology and My Systematic Theology of Love | Thomas Jay Oord

    Process Explorations

    The shift from theologies oriented around controlling power to one oriented around uncontrolling love radically reshapes what systematic theology can be. It centers experience in bold ways, and not just the experiences of white men. In this session, Thomas Jay Oord explores ten differences between his systematic theology of love and traditional systematic theologies.