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What is Open and Relational Theology?

What is Open and Relational Theology?
You may have heard the phrase Open & Relational Theology more these days, but maybe you aren't sure what it's all about.  The following is a good summary of Open & Relational Theology based on the ideas of Thomas Jay Oord. It also does an excellent job of Oord’s solution to the problem of evil.
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Love Is and Why it Matters

Love Is and Why it Matters
ometimes, what we generally accept as the loving thing to do (with the best of intentions) can, in fact, be unloving. When we start with what love is, it helps shape the ways we choose to love.
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Agape: An Evolution of Love

Agape: An Evolution of Love
Agape is an interesting Greek term. Ask five people; you'll get seven different definitions. Most agree that it is a unique kind of Love. However, a survey of the New Testament and one soon discovers that Agape wasn’t the special word it would later become. Agape (and its conjugates) were used in various contexts and…
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Helplessness of God’s Love

Helplessness of God’s Love
“What does the helplessness of God’s love mean for us? Simply, that divinity is no longer a power over us but now within us. God’s love becomes the human power to love, and this power to love, welling up from within, can face all obstacles, including the fear of death, because one no longer fears…
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The Heart is Deceitful? Not so Fast

The Heart is Deceitful? Not so Fast
The scriptures speak from many voices with different experiences and different contexts.  So we need to be careful when we build a cornerstone of our theological worldview on a single verse.  One such example is Jeremiah 17:9. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Is the heart deceitful?…
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The Dark Night

The Dark Night
We are raised to work harder, strive, stretch, brutalize the flesh and get what we want. Activity, or more accurately, productivity has become a sacred virtue in our culture.
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Why Hate the Sin and Love the Sinner Doesn’t Work

Why Hate the Sin and Love the Sinner Doesn’t Work
It surprises many to learn that the phrase hate the sin and love the sinner is not in the Bible. This idea seems to have originated with St. Augustine (c.424) in one of his letters when he used the phrase "Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum" which translates as "with love for mankind and hatred…
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Cosmic Community in Christ

Cosmic Community in Christ
Today I'm pondering estrangement, loneliness and isolation alongside the Apostle Paul's idea about Christ's mission "to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." Eph..1:10 NRSV. I am wondering about the shift from alienation, offence and estrangement to an experience of deep relationality and healing connectedness to one another; from…
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Fat Souls Part 2

Fat Souls Part 2
In our first reflection on Fat Souls, Adams-Farmer based on her reflection on S-I-Z-E ideas by Bernard Loomer. As we discovered in the last post, a Fat Soul is a beautiful soul characterized by its capacity for love, deep relationships and openness. Openness to new. Ideas, perspectives, levels of complexity, non-dual thinking without becoming defensive…
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Fat Souls

Fat Souls
I stumbled across Patricia Adams-Farmer - an author/philosopher/theologian, and she has written a few books, two of which I am reading through now. She is a gifted and engaging writer, and I find I connect with her imagery and her ideas of genuine beauty and what this might look like in real life as a…
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