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Abstract
Connolly's engagement of pluralist theologies and appropriation of the process cosmology of Whitehead permits this paper to connect process theology and the metaphor of theodicy that frames The Fragility of Things. Pursuing Connolly's observation that market outcomes are neoliberalism's 'best of all possible worlds,' this paper outlines the ways in which the process alternative to the economy of omnipotence resonates with Connolly's attention to the (God-free) "world of temporal forcefields" as a response to contemporary crises. Staging a meeting of Connolly's teleodynamic assemblage with the process "democracy of all creatures," this paper proposes a symbiogenetic solidarity along five transdisciplinary 'folds.'
I am grateful for the invitation to address you this evening on the subject of this extraordinary book, a book that rises to the occasion of our extraordinary planetary situation. Maybe it is a symptom of the fragility of things that you would have a theologian opening this conversation. Not that I think many of you are desperately seeking God-like those poor victims of the cataclysmic Lisbon earthquake who churn through the opening of William Connolly's book. I assume your positions would be closer to Voltaire's indignant response to all the theological justifications. Am I then to stand in for the history of Christian theodicy? Oh dear. That makes me feel pretty fragile.
Instead I will gratefully presume that you are already drawn to Connolly's entire project, of which this new book is a consequential unfolding: to stir up "a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites," each of which may provide some crucial element of resistance to the hegemony of neoliberal economics.1 As he puts it: "to advance such an agenda it is also imperative to negotiate new connections between nontheistic constituencies who care about the future of the Earth and numerous devotees of diverse religious traditions who fold positive spiritualities into their creedal practices."2
I will make it my duty here to represent some cross section of those diverse devotees. I wish I could stand stalwartly here before you as, say, a United Methodist Christian leader in the long term movements to green and queer and decolonialize my denomination. Certainly I am close to such. Those students, colleagues, and currents flow through me, along with a funkier array of "positive spiritualities"...