Process-Relational worldview? * Three Short Summaries
From Marcus and Sandra Lubarsky from Flagstaff College
Everything is interconnected.
Everything has value.
There is a profound relationship between beauty, creativity, and life.
Nature is not lifeless, insentient matter and reality is not fundamentally mechanistic.
Reality is emergent, evolutionary, creative, and social.
We live in a world of feeling beings in responsive relation to each other.
All beings aim to enjoy the vividness of life.
From Jay McDaniel
Everything is in process; reality is flowing; nothing ever stays the same.
All things are interconnected; no human is an island; things are present in one another even as they have their autonomy.
The whole of nature has value; all live beings deserve respect; human beings are not the sole repository of value.
Human beings find happiness in sharing experiences with others; there are no isolated egos; all selves are selves-in-relation; humans become whole through reciprocity.
The essence of the universe is a continuous creativity of which all things are expressions; there is creativity in plants and animals, hills and rivers, trees and stars.
All beings seek harmony as their guiding ideal; harmony includes differences; the whole of the universe is a harmony of harmonies.
Thinking and emotion cannot be sharply separated; mind and body are not two; even thinking is a form of feeling; aesthetic wisdom and rational inquiry are complementary.
Every moment of human experience begins, not with projecting things onto the world or even acting in the world, but with feeling the presence of the world and being affected by it.
From Lynn De Jonghe combining elements of the previous two
Everything flows–reality is a process; nothing ever stays the same.
The process of reality is creative, emergent, evolutionary, and social.
There is a profound relationship between creativity, beauty, and life.
The whole of nature has value; all of life deserves respect.
Everything is interconnected; nothing in nature stands alone.
Human experience begins by feeling the presence of the world and being affected by it.
Thinking and feeling cannot be sharply separated; mind and body are not separate entities; aesthetic wisdom and rational inquiry are complementary.
Human happiness involves sharing experiences with others and responding in harmony to these relationships.
Harmony includes differences as well as similarities; the entire universe is a harmony of harmonies.
* Many people ask what is entailed in a process-relational worldview. Above please find three short summary statements. To these three many process theologians would add a certain way of understanding God or the Sacred. For an overview, see God in Process Theology. Also, many might wish for more subjects to be mentioned; see Jay McDaniel's 20 Key Ideas in Process Thought. But short summaries are sorely needed, and we hope one or all of these might serve your purposes if someone asks you: "What are core principles of process-relational thought."