This week I was able to attend the Emergent Village Theological Conversation, which was intended to be engagement with some of the foremost thinkers of process theology.  As a student at Claremont, the ideas were not knew to me, and I do not consider myself a process person.  Nonetheless, as I continue to struggle with questions about providence and God's sovereignty over the suicidal direction our planet and global economy seems to be taking, something from the conference did indeed take on new meaning for me that I'd like to share.  One of the main reasons I feel this way I think is because these new depths are not exclusive to process thinking but have already been implicit in the Christian tradition since Jesus's time.  It's clear that other people have recognized some of the same things.

Prior to this week in two different readings I came across the following:

"While personal concern is sustained by a continuously growing faith in the value and meaning of life, the deepest motivation [going into] the future is hope.  For hope makes it possible to look beyond the fulfillment of urgent wishes and pressing desires and offers a vision beyond human suffering and even death.  A Christian is a [person] of hope whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived for [her] personality, or on specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given to [her] . . . This hope stretches far beyond the limitations of one's own psychological strength, for it is anchored not just in the soul of the individual but in God's self-disclosure in history. [The Christian life] therefore is not called Christian because it is permeated with optimism against all the odds of life, but because it is grounded in the historic Christ-event which is understood as a definitive breach in the deterministic chain of human trial and error, and as a dramatic affirmation that there is light on the other side of darkness.  Every attempt to attach this hope of visible symptoms in our surroundings becomes a temptation when it prevents us from the realization that promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian[ living]." - From <em>The Wounded Healer</em> by Henri J. M. Nouwen

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