Process Mysticism with Dan Dombrowski

Join us Thursday, April 10, at 7 p.m. ET for a Center for Christogenesis webinar with Professor of Philosophy Dan Dombrowski.

The term “mysticism” can mean at least two different things. The term can refer to direct experience of God or it can refer to the thesis that reality is ineffable and can be characterized only in paradoxical ways. These two meanings are quite different because there is nothing in the concept of direct experience of God that entails paradox or ineffability. 

The purpose of the presentation is to explore both senses of what it means to be a mystic from the perspectives of several process philosophers or neoclassical theists, including Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and especially Charles Hartshorne. This exploration will dispel the traditional opposition between the God of religious experience and “the God of the philosophers.” 

Dan Dombrowski will argue against the classical concept of God, which gives rise to such opposition. Judicious versions of divine inclusiveness, nature mysticism, ideal power (if not omnipotence), asceticism, apophaticism, “visions and voices,” and religious aesthetics and ethics will also be discussed, as time permits.  

About Dan Dombrowski

Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of twenty-two books and over two-hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature. Among his books are Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 

His latest book is Process Mysticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023). He is the Editor of the journal Process Studies and is Past-President of the Metaphysical Society of America.

The recording will be available to all registrants within two weeks of the event.