Courses offered at the OSTS are available in both the fall and winter terms. Classes are held on Monday evenings starting at 7:30 p.m. at the Dominican University College. The fall 2017 term courses starts on September 18: Process theology Ottawa

Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed. Life giving spirituality 

Course offered at the OSTS is available in both the fall  terms. Classes are held on Monday evenings starting at 7:30 p.m. at the Dominican University College.

The fall 2017 term courses start on September 18 and end on Nov 27

I have borrowed this title from my friend Bruce Epperly to address faith formation. It is a pressing issue for the United Church. For we are perplexed about what language supports faith formation. To do this, Borg suggests the church needs to reclaim Christian language. I will provide a progressive and postmodern theology, reclaiming Christian language.

An issue debated is the post-theism turn. I offer an alternative view of God, Panentheism, that goes beyond supernaturalism or post-theism: a God worthy of worship. A. N. Whitehead suggested this is the primary question for any spirituality.

Panentheism offers a fresh vision of the place of prayer in both personal and corporate worship. Charles Hartshorne said “A personal God is one who has social relations, really has them, and thus is constituted by relationships and hence relative.” Panentheism recovers a sense of God.

I will be showing how a process theological view works in an interfaith situation that goes beyond dialogue to mutual transformation. As well it honors the uniqueness of each religious path.

I will show how process thought helps in the science and religion debates, to move us beyond the traditional two solitude  view. And will examine ethics for a small planet.

Another issue to be examined is an affirmation of pluralism and how secularization is the best thing that has happened to religion. A growing collection of philosophers and theologians, including Canada’s Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, and John Cobb Jr maintain we have to move beyond understanding secularization merely as a process of “subtraction,” “loss” and “disenchantment.”

These thinkers redefine secularization – as a social development by which religion loses its state-sanctioned authority and moral absolutism. Secularization is creating societies in which religion is treated as one option among many. Cobb says. "It does not give any privileged authority to tradition."
The goal of the discussion is to affirm the Church in creative transformation and the pragmatic value of Process theology for that transformation.