ROOTBALL: Remembering John B. Cobb, Jr.

Rootball is the newsletter of Pando Populus.

Pando unites the people who care most about the future of Los Angeles. Focuses them on the right things. And motivates them. With passion. To implement LA County’s sustainability plan.

John Cobb posing for the camera as fighter for justice during the Roadtrip to Pando in 2018 at the Pando Grove, Fish Lake, Utah.

In memoriam: John B. Cobb, Jr., 1925-2024

By Eugene B. Shirley, Jr.

We recently lost our great, dear John Cobb, right after Christmas and before the fires. He was only a few weeks away from his hundredth birthday, February 9.

John B. Cobb, Jr. was Founding Chair of Pando Populus. He was the world's leading this, the first to write about that, the pioneering figure who... His firsts alone in small, single-spaced type are enough to overfill an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, each first listed one after another. I talked with him about his long list of accomplishments once and he said, "Well, by the time you get to be my age, you're going to be the leading something or other in some category simply because you will have outlived everybody else!" The humility was John, as was the humor. But if anyone deserves to be thought of in the category of the great and the good, it is he.

John Cobb and Ed Bacon at the Parliament of World Religions.

John Cobb changed my life

Shortly after the passing of John B. Cobb, Jr., Pando’s Founding Chair, Ed Bacon spoke movingly in a sermon about John’s life and legacy, delivered at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, TN. The following was inspired by Ed’s sermon. Ed follows John as Chair of the Pando Board of Directors.

One of the great philosopher-theologians of our time, who will for generations be recognized as a defining intellectual giant of the 20th and 21st centuries, who put science and religion, critical thinking and theology, clear-eyed reason and faithful commitment together and thereby significantly changed the way contemporary theology, religion, and interreligious dialogue were taught and practiced was John Cobb.

John was the most important living architect of a school of theological and philosophical thought known as process theology, and he was a dear friend of mine. He died the day after Christmas at age 99. If he had lived just 6 more weeks, he would have reached 100. His mantle now falls to me as chair of Pando Populus, one of numerous organizations he had a major role in founding. My prayer is that I may be worthy of walking in the footsteps of his legacy even as we adventure into new opportunities.

If you wish to celebrate John's life with a gift, please know that we have established with the support of his family a special John Cobb Projects Fund. The Fund is in honor John's can-do, entrepreneurial spirit and will provide young people with seed funding to underwrite Pando Days projects that are making a difference in the Southland.

Please click on the DONATE link and specify your donation as being "For The John Cobb Projects Fund." It will immediately go to work.

Selected blog posts by John Cobb from the Pando archives

Over the past decade, John contributed many Pando blog posts on a wide variety of subjects. We've pulled from the archive a smattering that reflects some of his thinking and included them below. Enjoy.

One More Thing Before I Go

What saddens me is that I’m not leaving [my great-grandchildren] a world nearly as hospitable as the one I was born into, or with such promising prospects.

So I’ve decided there’s one thing I want to do before I go: help lay the foundations, not just for an environmentally sustainable fix here or there, but for an ecological civilization.

What Keeps Us Trying?

No political leader has proposed, perhaps has dared to propose, the changes we need to make in order that the planet retain some of its beauty and some of its wonderful support of human life.

Is there any point in continuing the struggle? Is not the old advice better: “Eat, drink, and be merry,” for there is nothing you can do to stave off catastrophe?

Why do we keep on working for a cause that objectively we may judge is hopeless? I will try to answer honestly for myself.

Philosophy Is Not Only for Philosophers

That philosophy is not just for philosophers was self-evident in much of Western history. Everyone needs and wants to act and think wisely. “Philosophy” means the love of wisdom. Surely this cannot be a specialized study unrelated to actual life!

It is only in quite recent times that “philosophy” has taken a different turn. This is part of the story of the modern university. But what about philosophy as the quest for wisdom?

On the Importance of Thinking (and Rethinking)

We live in what some people would call a connected age, and yet it stems from a worldview of radically disconnected individuals. We probably think of ourselves as highly informed, and yet our culture is almost certainly uniquely un-intellectual and even anti-intellectual.

Pando questions fundamental assumptions of culture, proposes alternatives, and does what it can to foster intellectual life. But why are big ideas, and the intellectual life that surrounds them, so important? Why not simply be “practical?”

The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead

Many who are familiar with Pando Populus know of its intellectual roots in the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead. But fewer may be familiar with Whitehead’s place in the history of ideas and the community that has developed in response.

Alfred North Whitehead was a revered teacher at Harvard University from 1924-37. Today there is no interest in his thought at Harvard or, indeed, at the great majority of American universities. Why has this change occurred?

Cobb and Bacon on King

In celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we asked Pando Chair John B. Cobb, Jr. and Vice Chair Ed Bacon to comment on the relationship between Pando and King.

PANDO: What was Pando about King?

ED BACON: In the pulpit of Washington’s National Cathedral, Dr. King claimed, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”

JOHN COBB: We are individuals in community – a community of

communities of communities of communities.

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. both called for personal dedication to the cause. But they realized that nothing would happen except as people joined intimately together, presenting a united force to oppression.

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