What do you think?
Rate this book
Presence and Process: A Path Toward Transformative Faith and Inclusive Community
The North American Christian church of the early twenty-first century finds itself in a period of decline. A growing percentage of young adults are not entering the front doors of churches while at the same time older and previously dedicated Christians are leaving. Coinciding with the deflation of the Western church is the explosion in popular culture of the mindfulness movement, which emphasizes meditation practices derived from Buddhism. These concurrent phenomena—the decline of Christendom in North America and the rise of a Westernized form of Buddhism and various secularized applications of Buddhist meditative practice—form an interesting juxtaposition that warrants exploration.
- GenresSpirituality
232 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2017
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 22, 2021
Mr. Coleman, don’t feel like you have to read this review, I don’t want to hurt your feelings and feel like we’d actually get on well if we had the chance to connect…
That said, what the HELL is going on with this book! Who was the editor? How did it make it through to publication! I am genuinely distraught over this because, as a burgeoning Quaker with tremendous interest in process theology, I could not have been more thrilled to discover this book. Which means I could not be more disappointed by what I encountered.
When I go about writing a big paper, I begin by making a document where I compile a whole host of quotes that help to inform my thinking and that I may draw from to support my writing. This book, essentially, reads as one of those documents: a constellation of quotes, one after the other after the next — and many of them are large block quotes eating up the bulk of the page they’re on, only to be followed by further quotes. There is almost no analysis, unpacking, elaborating, connecting. Coleman’s voice is hardly present throughout the text; he functions not so much as a writer but a collage-maker, presenting all these juxtaposed insights together…without really offering his own.
This makes for an immensely frustrating reading experience, as you leap from one lily pad to the next, unable to develop a rhythm of reading because of the constant choppy jumps from one person’s thoughts to the next. I have read books that I’ve felt drew heavily from other resources, but never to the extent I found here. I ended up half heartedly skimming it, and can’t even count it as actually read, but I had to leave this review. Just a huge friggin bummer because the thesis and general idea and even all the materials he is sharing are good in their own right, but those disconnected pieces do not make for a good puzzle without the writing putting them all
together for us and presenting a clear, independent voice in doing so.
That said, what the HELL is going on with this book! Who was the editor? How did it make it through to publication! I am genuinely distraught over this because, as a burgeoning Quaker with tremendous interest in process theology, I could not have been more thrilled to discover this book. Which means I could not be more disappointed by what I encountered.
When I go about writing a big paper, I begin by making a document where I compile a whole host of quotes that help to inform my thinking and that I may draw from to support my writing. This book, essentially, reads as one of those documents: a constellation of quotes, one after the other after the next — and many of them are large block quotes eating up the bulk of the page they’re on, only to be followed by further quotes. There is almost no analysis, unpacking, elaborating, connecting. Coleman’s voice is hardly present throughout the text; he functions not so much as a writer but a collage-maker, presenting all these juxtaposed insights together…without really offering his own.
This makes for an immensely frustrating reading experience, as you leap from one lily pad to the next, unable to develop a rhythm of reading because of the constant choppy jumps from one person’s thoughts to the next. I have read books that I’ve felt drew heavily from other resources, but never to the extent I found here. I ended up half heartedly skimming it, and can’t even count it as actually read, but I had to leave this review. Just a huge friggin bummer because the thesis and general idea and even all the materials he is sharing are good in their own right, but those disconnected pieces do not make for a good puzzle without the writing putting them all
together for us and presenting a clear, independent voice in doing so.
August 12, 2020
The book has a good list of recommended reading at the end to find out more about the the main subjects of the book: Christan contemplation, Buddhist meditation, and process theology. The author strung a lot of quotes together, which made it a dry read. While the overview of each topic was informative, the book lacks synthesis at the conclusion. The author's main stance on community is to build centered on the practices of contemplation rather than creeds. The book felt half-finished, without a practical outline of how to build the kind of communities the book envisions.
November 29, 2017
Very informative and engaging work. Coleman provides great introductions to Christian meditation and contemplative practices, as well as Buddhism & process theology. I think this is an ideal primer/jumping off point to go deeper into any of these disciplines, and to have a solid framework from which a more robust praxis can be built.
November 2, 2017
Great in concept and in application, but a bit of a heady theological read ...which wasn’t exactly what I was craving upon reading about the subject.
April 25, 2025
Excellent introduction to the contemplative tradition--Christian and Buddhist.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews