Many theologians have been reconceiving the God-world relation, challenging the separation that underlay too much of Patristic and Scholastic theology. These panentheists affirm a radical indwelling of God within the world and the world within God. During the same period scientists have begun to abandon the reductionist ideology that characterized much of the modern period. Reductionism is being replaced by a new emphasis on emergence: the study of how new structures and entities arise throughout the evolutionary process and how each requires its own>form of explanation.
Surprisingly few theologians have recognized the paradigm shift represented by the convergence of these two important schools of thought. Clayton's pioneering work develops new models of God and the God-world relation in light of panentheism and emergent complexity and models an open-minded Christian theology that still respects tradition....

This compact volume offers a way for Christians to reflect deeply on how best to conceive Christian identity, commitment, and discipleship in today's challenged, globalized, pluralistic scene. Growing out of the recent "Rekindling Theological Imagination" initiative and led by esteemed theologian Philip Clayton and his colleagues, this volume seeks to capture and articulate the ferment in grassroots North American Christianity today and to relate it directly to the recent strong resurgence of progressive thought and politics. It argues strongly for a mediating role specifically for Christian theology, conceived first as a life practice of Christian discipleship, and its call has found enormous response from popular audiences in conferences, online, in informal Christian settings, as well as in mainline denominations and the academy....

Science deeply challenges classical descriptions of the human person as free and as spirit. This survey of contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary biology explores why these challenges have arisen. At the same time it finds in the religious dimension of human existence powerful resources for speaking of the Emergenz des Geistes and of a deeper sense of human freedom....