I spent several weeks deeply immersed in process theology, and I'm afraid my assessment of it is even worse than I went into it. I find it really a form of what Conor Cunningham would call as me-onto-theo-logic where something comes from nothing -- a form of modernist historicism of the endless repetition of the new and improved that masks the fact that nothing really changes in the system. The process god, it seems to me, never makes it to the present or the future, but remains, in a real sense, a corpse of the movement of history confined to the immediate past. The neo-classical language of god's infinity and eternality is the eternality of absolute potential or abstraction -- in other words, no thing at all -- no actuality. It shows the interesting relationship between the concepts of nothing and infinity, and process uses this ambiguity to hide the fact that its dipolar god evacuates god into the result of the historical processes and pure eternal potentiality -- nothing.

Now I'm reading into Greek and ancient Near Eastern cultures. Walter Burkert has several works arguing that the Greeks developed due to its eastern most point that was able to absorb the higher culture of the near east, yet stay outside the destructive impulses of its imperial militarism. He locates the point of this influence from the 8th century through the fourth -- neo-Assyrians through the Persians. Of course, this undercuts a Hegelian dialectic between the "Greek" and the "Jewish" as Judah itself was very similar to Greece in its location within, but on the outskirts, of this colonial imperial powers. This interaction became deeply embedded in the life of Judah from the 8th century onward.

Tomorrow I plan to read about the shifting institutional structures of the 1960s and the formation of graduate programs in religious studies, along with digging more into the eight century BC. Also, I hope to dig out my Chronicles drafts and start heavy editing and composing. I hope to finish the genealogical sections by the middle of October.