Review of John B. Cobb, Jr. (ed.), 2012, Religions in the Making

In 1926, the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead published his seminal work, Religion in the Making, reflecting on the place of religion in human life in light of his innovative cosmology. In this work Whitehead lamented that neither Christianity nor Buddhism had engaged in a full dialogue with contemporary science and cosmology, and he hoped for such reflection in the future. Three years later, Whitehead published a more systematic reflection on God and the cosmos, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Departing from most traditional monotheistic approaches, Whitehead presented creativity as the ultimate in his philosophy of organism, and he viewed God as its primordial accident. For Whitehead, God does not create the universe out of nothing, does not radically transcend the world, and is not omnipotent. Whitehead saw God as constantly interacting with the world, receiving each event into the divine life and proposing a divine aim for each new occasion, operating by persuasion, not coercion. While Whitehead was not a professional theologian, his philosophy of organism had an important influence on many Christian theologians in the decades that followed, and Mordecai Kaplan developed the ideas for Reconstructionist Judaism in awareness of Whitehead’s work. In Religions in the Making, one of the most distinguished leaders of Christian process theology, John B. Cobb, Jr., invites scholars from a variety of religions to consider the relation between Whitehead’s thought and the perspectives of their respective traditions.