John B. Cobb

In 2019, Cobb led the formation and was a founding board member of the Claremont Institute for Process Studies, a non-profit organization that aims to "promote a process-relational worldview to advance wisdom, harmony, and the common good" by engaging "in local initiatives and cultivates compassionate communities to bring about an ecological civilization." One year later, the organization was renamed the Cobb Institute to honor his life, leadership, and influence, and to better align its work and mission with its name. Cobb continues to be an active board member and guiding influence.

In 2015, Cobb was a founding board member of the Institute for Ecological Civilization (EcoCiv), a non-profit organization which seeks to enact "a fully sustainable human society in harmony with surrounding ecosystems and communities of life." Cobb remains on EcoCiv's board of directors.

In 2014, Cobb was the founding chairperson of the board for Pando Populus, an LA-based non-profit organization that seeks to enact a more ecologically balanced way of life in the LA area. Cobb remains on Pando Populus' board of directors.

In 2013, Cobb was a founding board member of Process Century Press, an academic press dedicated to transdisciplinary applications of process thought. He remains on PCP's advisory board.

For a list of Cobb's published articles through 2010, see the list at The Center for Process Studies.

With Zhihe Wang, Cobb founded the Institute for Postmodern Development of China (IPDC) in 2005, and currently serves on its board of directors. Through the IPDC, Cobb helps to coordinate the work of twenty-three collaborative centers in China, as well as to organize annual conferences on ecological civilization.

In 2005, Cobb was the founding President of the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China. The IPDC works to promote new modes of development in China and the West, drawing from both classical Chinese philosophy and constructive forms of Western thought in order to address practical problems associated with economic growth, social change, and globalization. Cobb continues to work on the IPDC's board of directors.

Within the last twenty years, Cobb has become increasingly distressed by the popular identification of Christianity with the religious right and the weak response of mainstream Protestants. To encourage a stronger response, he organized Progressive Christians Uniting with the Episcopal priest George Regas in 1996, chaired its reflection committee, and edited a number of its books. As the perceived gap between the policies of the American government and Christian teaching grew wider, these books moved beyond simply reformist proposals. The last of these was entitled Resistance: The New Role of Progressive Christians.

In 1996, Cobb co-founded the Claremont Consultation with George Regas in an effort to organize and mobilize progressive Christian communities. In 2003, the organization's name was changed to Progressive Christians Uniting. PCU today describes itself as "a social justice and faith organization dedicated to amplifying hope and actions individuals can take that lead to a more compassionate and just world."

Cobb also co-authored a book with Herman Daly in 1989 entitled For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, Environment, and a Sustainable Future, which outlined policy changes intended to create a society based on community and ecological balance. In 1992, For the Common Good earned Cobb and Daly the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

In the area of religion and biology, he co-wrote The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community with Australian geneticist Charles Birch in 1981. The book critiqued the dominant biological model of mechanism, arguing that it leads to the study of organisms in abstraction from their environments. Cobb and Birch argue instead for an "ecological model" which draws no sharp lines between the living and non-living, or between an organism and its environment. The book also argues for an idea of evolution in which adaptive behavior can lead to genetic changes. Cobb and Birch stress that a species "co-evolves with its environment" and that in this way intelligent purpose plays a role in evolution:

As part of his investigation into why economic policies so frequently worsened the ecological situation, in the 1980s Cobb decided to re-evaluate gross national product and gross domestic product as measures of economic progress. Together with his son, Clifford Cobb, he developed an alternative model, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, which sought to "consolidate economic, environmental, and social elements into a common framework to show net progress." The name of the metric would later change to genuine progress indicator. A recent (2013) article has shown that global GPI per capita peaked in 1978, meaning that the social and environmental costs of economic growth have outweighed the benefits since that time.

In 1973, Cobb co-founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin as a faculty research center of the Claremont School of Theology, and currently still serves as its Co-Director. The Center for Process Studies is the leading institute on the process philosophy and process theology inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and others.

In 1971, he wrote the first single-author book in environmental ethics, Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology, which argued for the relevance of religious thought in approaching the ecological crisis. In 1989, he co-authored the book For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, Environment, and a Sustainable Future, which critiqued current global economic practice and advocated for a sustainable, ecology-based economics. He has written extensively on religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue, particularly between Buddhism and Christianity, as well as the need to reconcile religion and science.

Cobb went on to write the first single-author book in environmental ethics, Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology, in 1971. In the book, he argued for an ecological worldview that acknowledges the continuity between human beings and other living things, as well as their mutual dependence. He also proposed that Christianity specifically needed to appropriate knowledge from the biological sciences in order to undercut its anthropocentrism (human-centeredness) and devaluation of the non-human world.

Ecological themes have been pervasive in Cobb's work since 1969, when he turned his attention to the ecological crisis. He became convinced that environmental issues constituted humanity's most pressing problem. Cobb writes:

Speaking to this need of moving beyond classically "modern" ideas, in the 1960s Cobb was the first to label Whiteheadian thought as "postmodern". Later, when deconstructionists began to describe their thought as "postmodern", Whiteheadians changed their own label to "constructive postmodernism".

After writing several books surveying contemporary forms of Protestantism, Cobb turned in the mid-1960s to more original work which sought to bring Alfred North Whitehead's ideas into the contemporary American Protestant scene. Cobb aimed to reconstruct a Christian vision that was more compatible with modern knowledge and more ready to engage with today's pluralistic world. He did this in a number of ways.

After receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Charles Hartshorne in 1952, he spent three years teaching at Young Harris College in north Georgia, while also serving as part-time pastor to a six-church circuit and establishing a seventh congregation in the area. Ernest Cadman Colwell, formerly president of the University of Chicago, brought Cobb to Emory University in Georgia to teach in the new graduate institute for liberal arts. In 1958, Cobb followed Colwell to Claremont, California, where he was named Ingraham Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology and Avery Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. He established the Process Studies journal with Lewis S. Ford [de] in 1971 and co-founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin in 1973, making Claremont the center of Whiteheadian process thought. Twenty-five years later, together with Herman Greene, he organized the International Process Network. This organization holds biennial conferences, the tenth of which will be taking place in Claremont in 2015.

Cobb believed that through at least the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, American Protestant theology had been largely derivative from European (specifically German) theology. In the late 1950s, Cobb and Claremont professor James Robinson decided that the time had come to end this one-sidedness and move to authentic dialogue between American and European theologians. To establish real mutuality, they organized a series of conferences of leading theologians in Germany and the United States and published a series of volumes called "New Frontiers in Theology."

Cobb served in the occupation of Japan, then returned to the United States and left the army soon afterward. He then entered an interdepartmental program at the University of Chicago in 1947. There, he set out to test his faith by learning the modern world's objections to Christianity. His faith did not come out intact.

After his graduation from high school, Cobb attended Emory College in Oxford, Georgia, before joining the US Army in 1943. He was chosen for the Japanese language program, which was filled mainly with Jewish and Catholic intellectuals who helped make him aware of the narrow, parochial nature of his Georgia Protestantism.

In 1940, Cobb moved to Georgia, US, to finish high school. He found himself both bewildered and disgusted by the pervasive racism in the region, particularly the demonization of the Japanese. Seeing how the same events could be presented in such different ways based on the country in which he was living, Cobb became ever-more counter-cultural and critical of the dominant views in churches, media, universities, and government.

John Boswell Cobb, Jr. (born 9 February 1925) is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John Cobb was born in Kobe, Japan, on 9 February 1925, to parents who were Methodist missionaries. Until age 15, he lived primarily in Kobe and Hiroshima and received most of his early education in the multi-ethnic Canadian Academy in Kobe, to which he attributes the beginnings of his pluralistic outlook.