An Interview With John F. Haught
An audio interview with JOHN F. HAUGHT recorded September 11, 2017
In this audio interview Brie Stoner asks Professor Dr. John Haught to expand on some of his ideas and thoughts as introduced in his recent Omega Center blog THE NEW COSMIC STORY, entitled after his new book The New Cosmic Story: Inside Our Awakening Universe.
Historians are now expanding their views and examinations into the realm of “Big History” but their focus has primarily been on the objective “outside” story. Dr Haught suggests there is an inside story registered in the centers of our subjectivity, interior experience, and relationality, that are equally necessary to understand the cosmos and the awakening universe.
As the conversation continues the method of an “anticipatory” reading and analysis of the evolving universe is introduced, the impact of time on an unfolding process, and the essential nature of hope in welcoming the future:
“The future is the really Real in the anticipatory vision… so how do you face the future? … How do you face Reality if you follow the anticipatory approach? You do so by adopting the posture of hope. It’s only through hope that we let the future in…”
Finally, Dr Haught shares how approaching spiritual practice in an expanded and anticipatory way can add profound meaning and depth. He offers the example of approaching the Eucharist through the lens of Teilhard’s Mass on the World*.
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE (~ 39 minutes):
DOWNLOAD AUDIO MP3 HERE (Chrome, Safari, IE, and other browsers right-click & save to download)
*You can find the five-part prose poem “The Mass on the World” in its entirety in The Heart of Matter by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, pp 119-121.
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What is the nature of the posture of hope that the anticipatory reading of evolution of the universe involves? Does it involve hope in a particular (even if not clearly, specifically defined) future of ever greater coherence, complexity, and consciousness? If so, it seems that our hope is dependent on the denial of increasing entropy and expansion of the universe? It is insistent that things turn out the way that we think they should. Or do we need to adopt a posture of hope in relation to the process of evolution of the universe and the reality that is in process throughout it, no matter where that takes us as we participate in it? This hope would involve a faith in the meaningfulness of that process and our participation even though we cannot insist on where it goes.