Truth as Horizon, Not Property: Responding to Truth Cultures

Truth as Horizon, Not Property

On Faith, Scripture, and the Refusal of Certainty

A Public Creed for a Searching People in a Fragile Democracy

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Truth is not a possession to be guarded,

but a horizon best approached together.

- R.E. Slater

Public Creed

We believe truth is approached, not owned.

That faith must remain open to correction.

That any belief justifying cruelty and oppression has failed.

That love and human dignity come before doctrine.

Preamble

These statements do not claim authority, finality, or exclusive insight. It arises from the recognition that truth cannot be possessed without distortion, and that faith and democracy alike fail when certainty is used to excuse harm. In a time when religious and ideological language is increasingly invoked to justify brutal cruelty, exclusion, dehumanization, and unaccountable power, we offer these thoughts as a public posture or set of guidelines rather than as a doctrine - one that honors searching over certainty, responsibility over obedience, and shared becoming over fortified belief.

Truth is not what we hold.

It is how we walk together.

- R.E. Slater

 

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A Public Statement

• We affirm that truth is approached, not owned.
• That no institution, ideology, or tradition is exempt from correction or accountability.
• That certainty invoked to justify cruelty has forfeited moral authority.
• That human dignity precedes any civic or religious doctrine, policy, and power.
• That democracy depends on humility, plural voices, and the willingness to be wrong.
• That faith, when it is worthy of trust, remains open, revisable, and accountable to love.
• That shared responsibility matters more than enforced conformity.
• That dialogue, restraint, and compassion are civic and spiritual strengths, not weaknesses.
• That no claim to truth is legitimate if it requires dehumanizing the other.

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Faith is Not a Possession

One says they hold truth,
as one might hold a deed,
a barrier fence line,
at times barbed and long.

One might say they are biblical,
as though ink could finish breath,
as though God consented,
to be archived and laminated.

But truth was never a property.
It came as weather.
As fire that burned.
As a voice refusing permanence.

Moses carried it in stone that broke.
The prophets spoke of it in grief.
The psalmists and poets wrote of mercy.
The Jesus gospels spoke in parables
that God might be heard in no one way.

Truth was never so simply "handed over."
It was to be entered into experientially -

as  the burning bush and consciences alike.
To be walked on roads that came-and-went.
Whose borders were permeable and crossed.

Those claiming to own "biblical truth"
built walls around the poor and unwanted,
calling imposed cruelty obedience,
mistaking a loving faith for absolutism.

But such an abominable faith was

never the answer in God's economy.
It was to be a posture of listening.
The courage to say, "I do not know,"

and to walk together in pursuit.

We do not come to belief to arrive.

We come to search, to be corrected,

to be interrupted, to learn and listen,

to be widened by other perspectives.

To conclude this is heresy is to repeat

the heresy of Abraham leaving Ur,
of Jacob limping away from divine encounter,
of Mary consenting without clarity,
of Jesus rightly refusing lurid kingdoms.

Truth does not live in locked fortresses.
It breathes where questions are allowed,
where power is held accountable,
where love risks uncertainty.

If divinity speaks at all,
it speaks in the verbs of life -
calling, undoing, welcoming,
becoming, learning, loving.

And if democracy is to live again,
it will not be through sacred certainty,
or declared human "truths"

by human dogmas and doctrines.

But through shared searching -

together, in many voices,

in unfinished sentences,

by peoples re-learning how to listen,
without owning flat, finished answers.

Those who claim truth's possession
have learned to keep their locked doors.

But those who hold truth loosely

have unlocked their doors

to walk outside their mindscapes.

R.E. Slater
 February 8, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

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Seeking, Not Possessing

We do not claim to hold truth.
We commit ourselves to seeking it.

We reject the belief that Scripture is a finished subject,
or that "objectivized faiths" grant ownership of certainty.

We receive Scripture as witness, not weapon;
as provocation, not possession;
as a living field of struggle, failure, revision, and growth.

We deny any theology that confuses certainty with faith
or obedience with moral abdication of human rights and equality.

We refuse the use of “biblical truth” as a shield against responsibility,
or as a tool of discipline,
or as a justification for imposed, immoral, cruelty.

We reject fortress faiths -
faiths that make enemies of friends,
demands purity,
sacralizes power,
or renders love optional.

We affirm that faith is not assent but orientation;
not arrival but becoming;
not certainty but responsibility.

We stand with the deeper biblical postures -
of (rabbinic) argument, lament, parable, humility, and unfinished vision.

We believe any faith worthy of the name
must remain open to correction,
be accountable to the vulnerable,
and answerable to love's remiss.

We hold that faith and democracy rise or fall together -
each requiring humility, plural voices, revisability,
and the courage to be wrong and acknowledge it.

We confess that when belief harms another,
it has already betrayed its living source.

We do not guard truth -
We walk towards it, together.

R.E. Slater
 February 8, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

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Preamble

This creed does not claim authority, finality, or exclusive insight. It arises from a long recognition that truth cannot be possessed without becoming distorted, and that faith collapses when certainty is used to excuse harm. In an age when religious language is increasingly invoked to justify cruelty, exclusion, and authoritarian power, we offer this as a statement of posture rather than doctrine - one that honors searching over certainty, responsibility over obedience, and shared becoming over fortified belief.

Such a creed does not an end.

It is a refusal to close.

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A Civic Statement

• We affirm that truth is approached, not owned.
• That no institution, ideology, or tradition is exempt from revision or accountability.
• That certainty used to justify harm has forfeited moral authority.
• That democracy depends on humility, plural voices, and the willingness to be wrong.
• That human dignity precedes policy, power, and ideology.
• That shared responsibility matters more than enforced conformity.
• That dialogue, compassion, and restraint are civic strengths, not weaknesses.
• That no claim to truth is legitimate if it requires dehumanizing the other.
• That the future depends not on final answers, but on our capacity to listen, revise, and act together.

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An Anti-Creed Statement (What We Refuse)

• We refuse the claim that truth can be owned, guarded, or weaponized.
• We refuse the use of sacred language to excuse cruelty or indifference.
• We refuse obedience that dissolves moral responsibility.
• We refuse faith that builds fortresses instead of communities.
• We refuse certainty that silences dissent or punishes doubt.
• We refuse nationalism baptized as righteousness.
• We refuse purity tests that require enemies to survive.
• We refuse authority that answers only to itself.
• We refuse beliefs that demand suffering as proof of loyalty.
• We refuse any vision of order that renders love optional.
• We refuse the lie that arrival matters more than becoming.

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Truth as Horizon, Not Property

On Faith, Scripture, and the Refusal of Certainty

1. Holding Truth vs Seeking Truth

The difference between holding truth and seeking truth is not semantic. It is postural. It determines how Scripture is read, how faith is practiced, and how power is exercised.

To claim possession of “biblical truth” is to treat Scripture as a static deposit - as something finished, to be secured, and guarded. It becomes a boundary-marker distinguishing insiders from outsiders, and a credentialed authority that legitimizes teaching, discipline, and exclusion for others to follow. Truth, in this posture, is something one arrives at, then defends, and oppresses others for not assimilating towards their perceptions.

However, to seek truth through Scripture is to enter an altogether different relationship with the Divine, the sacred, the Loving Other - where holiness and justice conform to love and not love to holiness and justice.

Scripture must become a witness rather than a weapon, a provocation rather than a possession; to be encountered as a field of struggle, failure, revision, and growth... an unfolding conversation rather than a closed system of boundary truths. Here, faith is not about guarding (religious or faith) conclusions but about remaining open to interruption.

The church’s repeated insistence that it holds “biblical truth” must be framed in humility, but too often it is more accurately a descriptor for untenable, mythic certainties masquerading as real faith. And mythic certainties do not remain benign. They harden. Calcify. And eventually become inhumanly coercive as exampled by trans-abuse, immigrant-abuse, abuse of women, and children... all in the mighty name of faith.

One never should enter Christianity in order to "arrive". But to enter within to journey, wrestle, and be undone by the divine sacred of love and love's becoming. That holy posture - of seeking rather than possessing - places it's faithful closer to the Abrahamic-Davidic-Prophetic-Jesus tradition than those who claim to guard it.

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2. The Myth of “Biblical Truth” as a Finished Object

In contemporary church discourse, “biblical truth” functions less as a theological claim and more as a mechanism of control within its power centers. It serves as a rhetorical shield against critique, a disciplinary tool for enforcing conformity, and a permission structure for cruelty. Too frequently the children and women of bible-churches experience abuse and oppression in the name of "biblical truth."

It allows religious institutions such as churches, synods, denominations, and schools, to say, "We are not choosing oppression - we are merely obeying God."

But the Bible itself never behaves as a single, settled truth-system. It is argumentative rather than uniform. It revises itself across generations. It contains internal resistance and unresolved tensions. Its ethical vision advances in fits and starts. It is morally uneven and theologically self-correcting. It is a very real picture of people and societies in motion, seeking thrival and discovering brutal roadblocks to love and energy.

To claim the Bible as a "finalized truth" is to deny the Bible’s own mode of existence. Scripture does not present itself as a "closed answer" but as a living record of human struggle with God, neighbor, power, and responsibility where truth is always approached and never quite apprehended. At its height, Israel failed and crucified the living God... how much more does the church do the same thing with Jesus' love and faithfulness through high-and-holy rules and obedience sentences??

In this sense, “biblical truth,” as it is often deployed today, rests more on a mythic foundation than it does a truth foundation - not because Scripture is meaningless, but because it is too dynamically alive to be reduced to mere "era-specific or culture-oriented" certainty. The problem is not that Scripture is unstable, but that certainty demands a stillness Scripture refuses to provide, and to which "certainty faiths" always demand of themselves.

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3. MAGA Christianity and Fortress Faith

MAGA Christianity represents a particularly stark example of what happens when truth is treated as property. It fuses absolutist theology with nationalist identity and fear-driven boundary enforcement. The result is not faith, but oppresive fortress-building all in the name of "purity" and "White Christian culture".

Fortress faiths always require enemies. It depends on purity tests. It thrives on spectacle. It legitimizes punishment. It needs scapegoats to sustain itself.

This is why cruelty can coexist so easily with “biblical truth” language without producing cognitive dissonance. Once truth is owned, love becomes optional. Compassion becomes negotiable. Suffering becomes collateral.

Outsiders are not wrong to connect this magafaith-posture to ICE raids, dehumanizing policy rhetoric, indifference to suffering, and the sacralization of state power. These are not accidental failures of that theology. They are its logical outcomes.

When certainty is baptized, coercion soon follows.

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4. The Older, Deeper Biblical Posture

What must be articulated aligns not with today's modernized, albeit secular, faith absolutism, but with the deeper, "truer,"  biblical posture itself:

The Hebrew prophets argued with God rather than quoting Him. The wisdom tradition refused certainty and prized discernment. Jesus taught in parables precisely to prevent closure and resist final answers. Paul confessed that we see “through a glass, darkly,” acknowledging the limits of knowledge even within faith.

Across these traditions runs a consistent thread: faith is not assent - but reorientation. Not possession - but re-attunement. Not certainty - but re-acquired responsibility.

This posture cannot coexist with absolutism. One dissolves the other. The moment faith becomes fixed, it ceases to be faithful. The moment faith learns faithfulness it ceases to be fixed.

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5. Re-Birthing Faith and Democracy

To link this faith critique to democracy is exactly right. Democracy MUST depend on epistemic humility, a plurality of voices, critique and revisability, and the willingness to be wrong.

It requires shared participation rather than enforced conformity. These are not weaknesses. They are the conditions of collective life.

Similarly with any faith - whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc. When churches and faith groups claim to own truth, they train people to accept authoritarian certainty, moral exemption, and (often enforced) hierarchical obedience. When churches model God's love, they then place themselves in the posture of seeking truth rather than owning truth; cultivating dialogue rather than demand obedience; and willingly seek to be accountable, compassionate, shared responsibility, and grow in civic maturity with cultural and religious difference.

In summary, challenging the rhetorics of “biblical truth” is not an act of anti-faith or lost-faith; it is a very pro-God, pro-democratic, pro-human, and profoundly biblical in its deepest sense.

When true truth seeks seek loving, critiquing approaches to flat statements of "biblical truth" they are not dismantling their faith. They are removing false floors that lead to abuse and oppression. They are allowing perceived truth to breathe again as Abraham had learned with his experiences in Ur and later, with God. Seekers of true-truth are but naming the difference between faith as arrival and faith as becoming. We wish always to become the latter.

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A Manifesto Against Possessed Truth

On Faith, Scripture, and Democratic Life

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1. Truth is not a possession.
   Any claim to hold truth as settled, guarded, or owned has already begun to distort it.

2. Scripture is not a finished object.
   It is a living record of struggle, argument, revision, and moral growth.
   To freeze it is to betray it.

3. “Biblical truth” has become a mythic device.
   It now functions less as theological insight and more as a shield against responsibility,
   a tool of discipline,
   and a permission structure for cruelty.

4. Certainty masquerading as faith is not humility.
   It is mythic certainty—and mythic certainty always hardens into coercion.

5. We reject obedience that dissolves moral agency.
   “We are merely obeying” is not faith.
   It is abdication.

6. Fortress faith is not faith.
   Any belief system that requires enemies, purity tests, spectacle, punishment, or scapegoats
   has already abandoned love.

7. Cruelty justified by sacred language is not a failure of theology.
   It is its logical outcome when truth is treated as property.

8. The deeper biblical posture is unfinished by design.
   Prophets argued.
   Wisdom refused certainty.
   Jesus spoke in parables to prevent closure.
   Paul confessed partial sight.

9. Faith is not assent.
   It is orientation.
   Not arrival, but becoming.
   Not certainty, but responsibility.

10. Absolutism and faith cannot coexist.
    One dissolves the other.

11. Democracy and faith share the same ethical soil.
    Both require humility, plural voices, revisability, and the courage to be wrong.

12. When churches claim to own truth, they train people for authoritarianism.
    When they seek truth, they form people capable of dialogue, accountability, and care.

13. Challenging “biblical truth” rhetoric is not anti-faith.
    It is pro-human, pro-democratic, and faithful to Scripture’s living character.

14. We did not enter belief to arrive.
    We entered to walk, to wrestle, and to be undone.

15. The future belongs to becoming, not certainty.
    Faith that cannot be questioned will not survive.
    Faith that refuses possession may yet endure.

A Processual View of a Relational Horizon (3)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

A Processual View of a

Relational Horizon

ESSAY 3

Toward a Regenerative Vision for

Pluralistic Futures

Imagination, Hope, and the Ethics of Shared Becoming

by R. E. Slater & ChatGPT

A Processual View of Culture, Cohesion & Reproduction (1)

A Processual View of Regenerative Civilizations (2)

A Processual View of a Relational Horizon (3)

Civilizations do not endure because they are strong.

They endure because they have learned

 how to love what they are becoming.

- R.E. Slater

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Preface

Why Vision Must Remain Non-Coercive

Civilizations rarely fail for lack of rules. They fail for lack of imaginable futures.

When people can no longer picture a shared tomorrow that feels worthy of care, institutions hollow, commitments thin, and continuity falters. Even the most carefully designed systems begin to feel provisional, transactional, or fragile.

The previous essays have argued that this condition cannot be repaired through restoration alone. Nor can it be addressed by neutrality, tolerance, or administrative management. What is required is a deeper reorientation - one that reshapes how reality, relationality, and responsibility are understood.

This third essay takes up the most difficult task.

Not as a diagnosis.

Nor as a formation.

But as an articulation.

It seeks to describe a regenerative horizon capable of speaking to pluralistic societies without demanding uniform belief, enforced identity, or metaphysical closure. It does not attempt to supply a final narrative. It attempts to name a direction of travel.

Such articulation must remain non-coercive.

The moment a vision demands assent rather than invitation, it reproduces the very failures it seeks to heal. A pluralistic horizon must be spacious enough to host disagreement, difference, and doubt - while still offering sufficient coherence to sustain shared life.

The question guiding this essay is therefore precise:

What kind of future can be spoken of in common, even when ultimate meanings diverge?

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Introduction

From Solutions to Horizons

Modern societies are deeply solution-oriented. When faced with instability, fragmentation, or decline, the instinct is to ask what must be fixed, regulated, or optimized. This instinct has produced remarkable achievements. Yet it also carries severe limitations.

Monolithic Solutions address problems.

Relational Horizons orient lives.

A society can solve many problems and still lose its sense of direction. It can regulate behavior without cultivating hope. It can manage difference without generating belonging. What is missing in such contexts is not intelligence or effort. It is an orientation toward a shared horizon.

• A horizon is not a destination one reaches. It is a point of reference that shapes movement. It provides direction without dictating steps. It invites travel without guaranteeing arrival.

• In pluralistic civilizations, horizons matter more than blueprints. Blueprints require agreement. Horizons require only orientation. The horizon proposed here is relational.

It begins from the conviction that reality itself is not a closed system of isolated entities, but an open field of relation, becoming, and participation.

• Within such a field, meaning is not imposed from above or generated in isolation.

• Meaning arises through interaction, care, and shared responsibility over time.

This conviction does not belong exclusively to any single tradition. It appears, in varied forms, across religious, philosophical, and scientific registers. Its strength lies precisely in its translatability.

A relational horizon does not ask people to abandon their deepest commitments. It asks them to locate those commitments within a larger field of mutual becoming.

The sections that follow attempt to articulate this horizon in four movements:

• how a relational horizon reframes claimed truths and convictions
• how it reimagines hope without certainty - leaving room for doubt and uncertainty
• how epistemic humility provides an air of openness and dialogue with the different other
• how open dialogue invites shared participation without coercion

We proceed first by clarifying what kind of horizon this is not.

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I. A Horizon Without Totality

Why Regenerative Vision Must Remain Open

Every age that senses its own fragility is tempted by encircling, closed visions of orientation/belief.

When shared meaning thins and coherence weakens, the desire for comprehensive answers intensifies. People long for systems that promise clarity, unity, and resolution. Such systems offer relief from uncertainty, but they do so at a cost.

They artificially close what must remain open.

A regenerative horizon cannot be total... (A Processually Open-and-Relational) Reality doesn't work in this way. The moment a vision claims to account for everything, it ceases to orient and begins to dominate. It replaces invitation with requirement, participation with assent, and relationship with rule.

Pluralistic civilizations are especially vulnerable to this temptation.

Because they lack a single authoritative worldview, they often oscillate between two extremes. On one side lies coercive unity, enforced through ideology, identity, or power. On the other lies procedural neutrality, which avoids commitment altogether. Both fail for opposite reasons.

Total visions collapse pluralism by force.

Neutral visions collapse meaning by evacuation.

A relational horizon charts a different path.

It does not claim to explain the whole within concrete centers.

It refuses to close the future in determinative doctrine and dogma.

It remains oriented towards openness rather than exhaustive in imagination.

By definition, an open horizon recedes as one approaches it - much like a rainbow that can never be entered. Both natural events conceptually shape movement without ever becoming an object of possession. They offer direction without demanding arrival.

This distinction is crucial -

Total systems demand loyalty.

Horizons and rainbows invite travel.

In religious terms, totality often appears as dogmatic closure. In political terms, it appears as ideological absolutism. In secular terms, it appears as technocratic finality or moral reductionism. In every case, the logic is the same.

The world is assumed to be fully graspable.

Human meaning is assumed to be fully specifiable.

Difference is assumed to be ultimately resolvable.

Such assumptions are incompatible with relational becoming.

A processual understanding of reality insists that novelty is real, that emergence cannot be fully predicted, and that meaning arises within relationship rather than prior to it. This means that no vision of the good can be complete in advance of lived participation.

A regenerative horizon must therefore remain incomplete by design.

Not because it lacks substance.

But because it honors reality as unfolding.

This incompleteness is not weakness. It is fidelity to what reality is (as we have been describing it in processually-relational/experiential/panpsychic terms).

• It allows different traditions to orient themselves toward shared - participatory -futures without being absorbed into a single metaphysical or moral scheme.
• It allows disagreement to persist without becoming existential threat.
• It allows hope to function without specific guarantees.

Most importantly, it prevents regeneration from becoming another form of domination.

History offers sobering lessons here.

The most destructive visions have not been those without ideals, but those with ideals too certain of themselves. When the future is imagined as already certified and known, people become means to an end rather than participants towards that becoming. Sacrifice is then demanded rather than offered. Love is subordinated to outcome. And force is the mediating construct within any totalitarian system.

A relational horizon resists this logic.

It insists that the future is not something to be secured, but something to be co-created. It affirms that meaning emerges through encounter, not enforcement. It trusts that coherence can arise without closure. This trust does not eliminate conflict. It renders conflict a shared burden to be resolved equitably.

It does not eliminate difference.

It renders difference generative.

It does not eliminate risk.

It renders risk meaningful.

In this sense, the refusal of totality is not an abdication of responsibility. It is the condition for a responsibility that remains humane.

The next section explores how such a horizon reframes truth and conviction themselves - not as weapons or possessions, but as relational commitments carried within a shared world.

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II. Conviction Without Domination

How a Relational Horizon Reframes Claimed Truths and Convictions

I

Pluralistic societies often assume that convictions are the primary threat to shared life. Where strong claims to truth persist, conflict seems inevitable. The common response has therefore been to thin conviction itself - to translate belief into preference, truth into opinion, and commitment into private sentiment.

This strategy avoids confrontation, but it does so at a cost.

A civilization without convictions does not become peaceful. It becomes hollow.

The problem is not conviction as such.

The problem is how conviction is held.

A relational horizon reframes conviction without dissolving it. It does not ask people to surrender their deepest commitments, nor does it ask them to pretend that differences do not matter. Instead, it relocates conviction from the register of possession to the register of fidelity.

Convictions, within a relational frame, are not objects one owns.

They are commitments one lives/leans into.

This distinction is decisive.

When truth is treated as possession, it becomes something to be defended, imposed, or protected from contamination. Others appear primarily as threats or errors. Dialogue becomes strategic. Difference becomes a problem to be solved.

II

When truth is treated as fidelity, conviction remains strong but its posture changes. Truth is not something one controls, but something one seeks to be faithful to across changing circumstances and encounters. Other dogmas are no longer primarily rivals. They become interlocutors - sometimes challengers, sometimes teachers, sometimes witnesses to dimensions of reality one has not yet seen.

Rather than "relativizing truths" that are held dearly, communities/societies learn to "re-adapt those held truths" to the new realities around them. As example, science has greatly challenged the Christian belief - as it has all global religious beliefs. Since science cannot be silenced, a belief, dogma or a tenet, must learn to adapt itself - not artificially, but concretely - within the newer paradigm. This means that one's past beliefs are modified - but not diluted - to present realities so that they may continue.

Hence, a relational horizon therefore does not relativize truth.

It relationalizes access to it.

This does not imply that all claims are equal, nor that disagreement is illusory. It implies that truth, if it is real, exceeds any single articulation of it. Fidelity to truth therefore requires humility, patience, and openness to correction. The qualities of "doubt and uncertainty" then become necessary tools within pluralistic cultures where adherents must act like missionaries and be open to new forms of adaptation and perceived realities. In this sense, conviction without domination is not a compromise. It is a discipline.

It demands that those who hold strong beliefs also accept the responsibility of bearing them relationally. This includes the willingness to listen without defensiveness, to speak without coercion, and to remain present even when agreement does not emerge.

Such a posture transforms conflict.

Disagreement no longer signals failure.

It becomes a site of encounter.

It places the importance of relationships ahead of dibilitating disagreements.

And disagreements behind the importance of relationships.

III

Conviction, when held relationally, does not seek to eliminate difference. It seeks to remain truthful within difference. It accepts that shared life will often involve unresolved tensions, competing interpretations, and incomplete understanding. This acceptance is not resignation. It is realism grounded in respect for the complexity of reality itself.

A relational horizon thus creates space for convictions to remain substantive without becoming totalizing. It allows religious, philosophical, and moral traditions to speak in their own voices while acknowledging that no single voice exhausts the field of meaning.

This reframing is essential for pluralistic relational futures.

Without it, societies oscillate endlessly between coercion and collapse - between enforcing unity and evacuating meaning. With it, conviction can remain a source of depth rather than division.

The next section turns to a closely related consequence of this reframing.

If conviction is held without domination, then hope itself must be reimagined - not as certainty or guarantee, but as orientation sustained amid doubt and uncertainty.

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III. Hope Without Certainty

Leaving Room for Doubt, Risk, and the Unfinished Future

I

Modern societies often assume that hope requires assurance. Progress is expected to be measurable, outcomes predictable, and futures manageable. When such assurances fail, hope collapses into cynicism or fear-and-anxiety.

This expectation misunderstands hope.

Hope, within a relational horizon, is not confidence in outcomes. It is commitment in the absence of guarantees.

A civilization oriented toward relational becoming cannot promise success. But it can promise joined participation. It cannot eliminate risk. It can teach how to live with risk without paralysis or despair within the care and nurture of supportive communities.

Certainty, when mistaken for hope, quickly becomes brittle. It resists contradiction, fears uncertainty, and reacts defensively when challenged. In pluralistic contexts, such certainty often fuels domination or withdrawal. One group seeks to impose its vision. Another abandons the shared future altogether.

Hope without certainty charts a different course.

It accepts that the future is genuinely open - not merely unknown, but undetermined (processualism is the view that reality is always open and creatively novel). That life-giving novelty is real. That emergence cannot be fully predicted. That meaning and identity will arise in ways no generation can entirely foresee.

This openness is not a defect - it is the necessary condition for creativity.

A processual understanding of reality affirms that becoming is ongoing, that no moment exhausts possibility, and that new forms of coherence can emerge even from fragmentation. Within such a world, hope does not depend on control. It depends on trust in relation. This trust informs one's view of the universe, of nature, of society, and of the future ahead.

That reality is at all times renewing, regenerating, redeeming, reclaiming, and resurrecting. In the Christian idea of God, this is at all times true of God and God's creation. And not true of reality when elements within God's creation work against it... thus working against one's self, family, friends, neighbors, society, and nature itself.

This trust is not naïve optimism. It does not deny suffering, failure, or loss. It acknowledges that civilizations may falter, that injustices persist, and that progress is uneven at best.

What it refuses is despair disguised as realism.

Fear, dread, and despair assume that the future is already closed. That trajectories are fixed. That no meaningful deviation remains possible. In doing so, it forecloses the very agency required to make change imaginable.

Hope without certainty resists this foreclosure.

It allows doubt to remain present without becoming corrosive. Doubt, in this frame, is not the enemy of faith or commitment. It is a sign of humility before complexity. It keeps convictions flxible, supple, agile, imaginative, even speculative. It prevents vision from hardening into corrosive ideology.

Such hope is sustained not by prediction, but by practice.

II

People learn hope by participating in relationships that willingly prove capable of repair. By witnessing the persistence of care amid disagreement. By experiencing shared effort that yields meaning even when outcomes remain uncertain.

This is why relational participation, described in the previous essay, is so crucial.

Hope cannot be taught abstractly.

It must be encountered.

In pluralistic societies, hope emerges where people discover that difference does not inevitably lead to breakdown, that conflict can be carried without annihilation, and that shared life can continue even without full agreement.

This does not guarantee harmony.
It guarantees something more durable.
The willingness to stay. To abide.

And in the Christian concept of faith, when we and humanity fail, sin, corrupts, or worse, it's God stays, abides in relationship, and participates in individual and communal relationship.

• Hence, hope without certainty thus becomes a relational virtue.
• It holds to people without sacrificing their dignity, liberties, or freedoms.
• It encourages patience in reform rather than urgency for control.
• It fosters resilience rather than rigidity.
• It invites creative imagination rather than enforced fear.

A civilization grounded in such hope does not require its members to believe that the future will be good. It asks only that they remain open to the possibility that it can become better, together.

The next section turns to the epistemic posture that makes such openness possible — the humility required to remain in dialogue with others whose ways of knowing differ deeply from one’s own.

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IV. Epistemic Humility

Openness, Dialogue, and the Presence of the Other

A relational horizon cannot be sustained without epistemic humility.

This humility does not arise from skepticism or indifference. It arises from a sober recognition of the limits of human knowing within a reality that is relational, historical, and unfinished. No perspective, however deeply rooted or carefully reasoned, exhausts the whole as has been demonstrated here on this site year after year.

Epistemic humility is therefore not the denial of truth.

It is the refusal to confuse access to truth with possession of it.

In pluralistic contexts, this distinction becomes decisive. When individuals or traditions assume their knowledge is complete, dialogue collapses into (faith) oppression or (faith) defense. Other faiths, cultures, beliefs, are encountered not as subjects, but as errors to be corrected or obstacles to be overcome.

A (process) relational horizon invites a different posture.

It treats the other not as a problem to be solved, but as a presence through which reality may disclose something new. This does not require agreement. It requires attentiveness. It asks whether one is willing to learn without surrendering integrity.

Epistemic humility creates space for genuine dialogue precisely because it accepts that understanding is always partial. Traditions, beliefs, and worldviews are not reduced to interchangeable opinions, but neither are they insulated from critique or encounter.

Such humility is demanding.

It requires patience in the face of disagreement.

Restraint in the exercise of certainty.

Courage to remain open when one’s assumptions are dissettled

Yet without it, pluralism cannot move beyond tolerance. It becomes either brittle or hollow. With it, difference becomes an occasion for mutual illumination rather than mutual threat.

Epistemic humility in this context can function as a civic discipline. It trains individuals and communities to remain responsive rather than reactive, curious rather than defensive, present rather than withdrawn.

This posture does not weaken commitment - it deepens it beyond its folklores, false assurances, unhistorical and unscientific beliefs, etc. When (private/communal) beliefs are dissettled the most typical response is to defend and lash out. A process position says that these are the wrong havens to anchor into; that they weaken a faith when isolating it; and they cease to be attracting or attractive when removing the rights of others.

But commitments held with "truth-humility" are more resilient because they are not dependent on closure. They can survive challenge, revision, and growth.

Such humility prepares the way for the final movement of this essay - not simply dialogue, but shared  resounances through participation and experience of "the other."

---

V. Open Dialogue and Shared Participation

Invitation Without Coercion

Dialogue, by itself, is not enough.

Pluralistic societies often celebrate dialogue while leaving the structures of shared life unchanged. Words are exchanged, perspectives acknowledged, and differences named - yet participation remains thin, and responsibility remains diffuse.

A relational horizon presses further.

It understands dialogue not as an end in itself, but as a threshold to shared participation. Dialogue opens space. Participation inhabits it.

Open dialogue invites people into a shared world without demanding assent. It creates conditions under which individuals and traditions can speak in their own voices while remaining accountable to one another. It refuses manipulation, fear, and forced consensus.

Crucially, such dialogue must remain refusable.

The moment participation is compelled, it ceases to be relational. Coercion may produce compliance, but it cannot generate care, trust, or belonging. Shared life sustained by force is always provisional. Invitation, by contrast, respects agency. It asks not whether we will agree, but whether we will show up. It honors difference while still calling people into responsibility for what they are building together.

Shared participation emerges where dialogue is joined to practice.

People learn trust by working together.

They learn care by caring together.

They learn responsibility by bearing it together.

In such contexts, pluralism becomes lived rather than managed. Difference remains real, but it is carried within relationship rather than isolation. Conflict persists, but it is navigated rather than absolutized.

A relational horizon does not promise harmony.

It promises the possibility of common work without common belief.

This is its quiet strength when listening beyond stereotypes and ignorance.

It allows pluralistic civilizations to remain open without dissolving; to be healthily diverse without fragmenting; and concretely hopeful without illusion. It does not eliminate risk. It renders risk meaningful by locating it within shared commitment.

The future, in such a vision, is not secured by authority or agreement. It is sustained by people willing to participate in its formation — imperfectly, provisionally, and together.

That willingness is the horizon this essay has sought to articulate.

Not a destination.

Not a doctrine.

Not a dogma

But a direction of travel.

A direction of outreach, invitation, humility, and togetherness.

One that remains open enough to invite, and strong enough to endure.

---

Societies of Horizons

We did not inherit answers.
We inherited too commonly,

distance.

A line where sky meets ground
and recedes as we walk

towards its beauty.

Truth did not leave us.

But it is the hardest

to grasp.

Placed behind love,
truth learns travel

with us.

Hope did not promise arrival.
It asked us to keep company

in its embrace.

Between voices and

birthed generations,
between what we think

we know and what we have

there is always space

to learn, to be.

Not agreement.
Not certainty.

Not fortress-building.

But the work of staying open
long enough for meaning

to rise between us.

R.E. Slater

February 7, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

---

Bibliography

---

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Berger, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014.

Eberstadt, Nicholas. Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2019.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

A Processual View of Regenerative Civilizations (2)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

A Processual View of Regenerative

Civilizations

ESSAY 2

Toward Relational Stability in Participatory Cultures

Pluralism, Participation, and the Recovery of Shared Life

by R. E. Slater & ChatGPT

A Processual View of Culture, Cohesion & Reproduction (1)

A Processual View of Regenerative Civilizations (2)

A Processual View of a Relational Horizon (3)

Civilizations do not endure because they are strong.

They endure because they have learned

 how to love what they are becoming.

- R.E. Slater

---

Preface

From Metaphysical Vision to Civilizational Ethos

I

The first essay argued that civilizations do not endure merely by strength, prosperity, or technical sophistication. They endure when people experience reality itself as meaningful, participatory, and positively open toward a future worth inhabiting.

That argument was metaphysical.

This second essay is civilizational.

It asks what follows socially, culturally, and ethically once reality is understood not as a static order to be dreaded and defended, but as a relational field of embracing becomingness in which many lives, traditions, and identities may learn how to dwell together.

If Essay One concerned the grammar of reality, Essay Two concerns the habits of living that makes such a grammar possible.

The question guiding this essay is therefore not:

What must people believe?

But:

What kinds of practices, dispositions, and institutions can arise when people experience themselves as co-participants in an unfinished world?

II

Pluralistic civilizations face a peculiar challenge. They cannot rely on a single sacred canopy, a uniformly accepted moral code, or an uncontested cultural center. Yet they cannot survive on procedural neutrality alone. A society that asks nothing of its members beyond tolerance will eventually lose the bonds that make tolerance meaningful.

Between coercive unity and hollow pluralism lies a more difficult path.

A path of shared participation without enforced sameness.

A path of belonging without domination.

A path of stability without stagnation.

This essay explores that middle terrain.

It does not offer a blueprint.

It does not propose a new ideology.

It does not imagine an escape from conflict.

Instead, it seeks to describe the shape of a regenerative civilization under conditions of difference.

A civilization capable of holding many stories without dissolving into noise.

A civilization capable of disagreement without mutual negation.

A civilization capable of continuity without collapsing nostalgia.

Such a civilization will not be built by policy alone. It will be built through a slow re-formation of civic imagination, moral expectation, and shared practices of care.

The sections that follow explore several dimensions of this re-formation.

How pluralism might move beyond mere coexistence.

How participation can replace passive belonging.

How generational continuity can be reimagined without cultural closure.

And how love, understood as relational coherence, can function as a civilizational virtue rather than a private sentiment.

We proceed now to the first section.

---

I. Relational Pluralism Beyond Tolerance

Why Coexistence Is Not Enough

I

Modern, successful ethnocultural pluralism often congratulates itself for restraint.

It refrains from imposing a single worldview.

It avoids overt theological domination.

It protects individual freedoms of difference.

These achievements matter. Yet much of what usually passes for pluralism is better described as monocultural pluralism.

By this is meant a social arrangement in which many identities are permitted to coexist, yet all are required to inhabit the same underlying cultural grammar:

Belief is treated as private preference.

Meaning is rendered subjective.

Commitment is assumed to be reversible.

Tradition is tolerated only insofar as it does not shape shared life.

Enculturating pluralism as described here is not relational. It is administrative. So that when pluralism is reduced to non-interference, it quietly undermines its own future, until it doesn't, and we next see a culture in chaos as we do today with America's maga culture and trumpian structures. Hence,

Tolerance alone creates distance, not belonging.

It allows people to live side by side, but not with one another.

It prevents violence, but does not generate trust.

Over time, a purely tolerant monocultural pluralistic society begins to feel thin.

Public life becomes transactional.

Civic identity becomes procedural.

Shared symbols lose resonance.

Common goods feel abstract.

People retreat into smaller enclaves of meaning, often defined by ideology, identity, or grievance. Politics hardens. Culture fragments. Institutions hollow out.

What is missing is not diversity - what is missing is participation.

II

A regenerative pluralism does not ask different groups merely to endure one another. It asks whether they can become co-authors of shared societal life without surrendering their distinctiveness.

This requires a shift in how pluralism is imagined.

Pluralism is not a truce between isolated worlds - It is a field of interaction.

In a processual understanding of reality, difference is not accidental. It is constitutive. The task is therefore not to eliminate difference, but to cultivate patterns of relationships which allow difference to remain generative rather than destructive.

Such cultivation depends upon shared practices rather than shared doctrines.

Practices of listening rather than proclamation.

Practices of hospitality rather than boundary policing.

Practices of mutual responsibility rather than enforced agreement.

These practices do not emerge spontaneously.

They must be learned, modeled, and sustained across generations.

A pluralistic civilization that wishes to endure must therefore ask a difficult question:

What do we do together that teaches us how to live together?

This question opens the way toward a different kind of civic ethos.

Not one grounded in sameness.

But one grounded in relational responsibility.

Monocultural pluralism does not, over time, grow into a richer ethnocultural pluralism. It thins culture rather than deepening it, leaving societies statically diverse yet relationally impoverished.

---

II. Relational Participation as the New Civic Center

From Passive Belonging to Shared Formation

I

If monocultural pluralism names the problem, relational participation names the direction of response.

The erosion of shared life in pluralistic societies is often misdiagnosed as a failure of agreement. Yet agreement has never been the primary glue of enduring civilizations. What binds societies together over time is not consensus, but participation in common practices that shape perception, expectation, and responsibility.

Modern societies have steadily displaced participation with enforced membership. And yet, as we have pointed out, this form of cultural membership is thin whereas enculturating participation is dynamically formative. Membership asks only that one be counted. Participation asks that one be shaped together with other (different or differing) memberships.

As civic life becomes increasingly procedural, individuals are treated less as contributors to a shared world and more as rights-bearing units navigating institutionalized systems. Belonging becomes abstract. Responsibility becomes optional. The civic sphere becomes something one uses rather than something one helps form.

Participation, by contrast, relocates the civic center.

It does not ask first what people believe.

It asks what people do, together.

This contrast has an analogue in political and economic discourse, where thinkers often distinguish between statism vs. dynamism:

• Statism emphasizes centralized control, fixed structures, and top-down coordination.

• (Processual) Dynamism, by contrast, emphasizes adaptability, initiative, and the creative agency of participants operating within evolving systems.

Yet the distinction becomes most illuminating when lifted from ideology and read civilizationally. The deepest problem with monocultural pluralism is not that it is insufficiently diverse, but that it is overly statized. It relies on administrative management rather than formative participation. It governs difference to be managed rather than cultivating relational involvement communally or societally.

Relational participation represents a different kind of dynamism. Not market dynamism. Not libertarian deregulation. But civic and cultural dynamism – the capacity of a society to generate meaning, responsibility, and continuity through lived interaction rather than centralized control or procedural neutrality.

II

In this sense, the failure of monocultural pluralism cannot be remedied simply by a return to ethnocultural pluralism. While ethnocultural pluralism rightly insists on cultural depth and historical inheritance, it remains insufficient on its own. That is, ethnocultural pluralism preserves difference, but does not necessarily generate relation. It acknowledges formation, but does not ensure shared formation.

What pluralistic civilizations require is relational pluralism.

Relational pluralism does not treat cultures as sealed units placed side by side, nor as interchangeable expressions of private preference. It understands cultural traditions as historically formed, living processes that come to themselves through interaction, translation, and participation in shared life.

In a participatory civic imagination, shared life is not sustained by ideological uniformity, but by repeated practices that cultivate mutual recognition over time. Example: Civically celebrated ethnic cultural times of the year, both together and apart. Chinese festivals, Greek festivals, Art celebrations, Environmental/Ecology Community days, etc. These should be thought out with care for the community and protection for its members.

Such practices do not eliminate difference.

They situate difference within relation.

III

Participation teaches people how to inhabit disagreement without collapse. It creates habits of listening, negotiation, and restraint that no abstract principle can supply on its own. It slowly forms citizens who experience themselves as contributors to a shared process rather than as isolated claimants competing for advantage.

This shift matters especially in pluralistic contexts.

When societies lack a single religious or cultural center, participation becomes the functional equivalent of a sacred commons. Not a space of shared belief, but a space of shared formation.

This does not mean that all practices are equal.

Regenerative practices and participation must be oriented toward relational "goods" that are publicly intelligible across difference. Goods such as care for the vulnerable, stewardship of shared environments, intergenerational responsibility, and the cultivation of trust.

Practices that generate these goods tend to share several features.

They are local enough to be embodied.

They are durable enough to be repeated.

They are open enough to include difference.

They are formative enough to produce new civic character.

Without such practices, pluralism drifts.

It becomes static rather than dynamic.

Managed rather than lived.

Tolerated rather than inhabited.

Participation also reframes the meaning of civic virtue.

Virtue is no longer primarily obedience to inherited norms.

Nor is it mere authenticity or self-expression.

Virtue becomes relational competence.

This means that communities learn the ability to engage difference without dehumanization. Build the capacity to accept responsibility without coercion. And form a willingness to contribute without guarantees of reward. These capacities cannot be legislated into existence. They are learned through practice.

IV

This is why attempts to revive civic life solely through rhetoric, moral exhortation, or policy reform so often disappoint. Without participatory formation, appeals to unity ring hollow and calls for sacrifice feel manipulative.

A regenerative civilization therefore requires a shift in emphasis.

From identity to contribution.

From representation to participation.

From passive inclusion to shared formation.

This does not resolve conflict. It changes how conflict is carried.

In many religious communities, practices such as Missionary Weeks have historically served an important formative role. At their best, they have exposed congregations shaped by a single cultural horizon to the complexity, dignity, and depth of lives lived elsewhere. Stories from missionaries working within Russian, Japanese, Muslim, or other cultural contexts have often disrupted parochial assumptions and softened inherited self-centeredness. They have shown that the gospel cannot simply be exported intact (as perceived by denomination context), but must be learned anew through encounter, translation, and humility.

At this level, such practices can function as genuine expansions of relational imagination. They teach that cultures are not empty vessels awaiting instruction, but living traditions worthy of respect and careful listening. They invite congregations to see themselves not as possessors of truth standing above others, but as participants in relationships that transform both giver and receiver.

Yet these same practices can also remain bounded by monocultural orientation. When missionary narratives are framed primarily in terms of successful assimilation, influence, or conversion outcomes, they risk reinforcing a subtle hierarchy of meaning. Difference is acknowledged, but only insofar as it becomes intelligible within the originating culture’s enforcing, assimilating categories. The encounter expands awareness, but not always reciprocity.

Relationally oriented practices shift the emphasis.

What matters is not how effectively beliefs are implanted, but how deeply relationships are formed. Not how well others are changed, but how thoroughly all participants are reshaped through encounter. When missionary engagement is understood in this way, it ceases to be a project of cultural extension and becomes a practice of mutual formation.

Such practices do not eliminate disagreement. They reframe it. They teach communities how to carry difference without domination, how to remain rooted without closure, and how to learn from others without surrendering integrity.

In this sense, the most generative missionary encounters are not those that reinforce (White, or Christian) monoculture, but those that quietly loosen it - replacing certainty with curiosity, control with care, and possession of truth with participation in a shared, unfolding work of healing.

In summary, when people experience themselves as co-participants in a shared field of becoming, disagreement is less likely to escalate into existential threat. The future is no longer imagined as something one group must seize from another, but as something that must be made together or not at all.

Participation thus becomes the civic-and-religious expression of a deeper metaphysical claim. That reality itself is not something we merely inhabit. It is something we help shape through how we relate with one another both within our pluralistic cultures and apart from it on foreign soils.

---

III. Relational Continuity

Generational Inheritance Without Cultural Closure

I

If relational pluralism names how difference is held, and relational participation names how shared life is practiced, relational continuity names how a civilization understands itself culturally in past, present, and future time.

No society endures without some lived sense that past, present, and future belong together. When this sense weakens, cultures may continue to function administratively, but they lose the interior confidence required for generational persistence.

In contemporary societies, this erosion of continuity is often noticed only when it becomes statistical. Declining birthrates, delayed family formation, rising loneliness, and the thinning of intergenerational bonds are treated as demographic anomalies or economic puzzles.

Yet these patterns point beyond themselves.

From a relational perspective, demography does not initiate civilizational decline. It registers it as something which is occurring and then, how to respond to it. Which is always the keystone... how to respond to perceived "negative" change, positively....

When people hesitate to bring new life into the world, the reason is rarely reducible to material calculation alone. More often, it reflects a deeper uncertainty about whether the world they inhabit is coherent enough, trustworthy enough, or meaningful enough to be passed on.

Relational continuity names the conditions under which such confidence can still arise - without requiring cultural closure, enforced sameness, or nostalgic restoration.

Continuity, in this sense, is not repetition.

It is creative inheritance.

II

A processually oriented relational civilization understands inheritance not as possession of a fixed past, but as participation in an unfolding story that began before any one generation and will continue beyond it. Traditions are not static forms to be preserved intact. They are living patterns that must be interpreted, translated, and sometimes reformed through new, timely circumstances and encounters.

This distinction matters profoundly in pluralistic contexts.

A society composed of multiple religious, cultural, and philosophical traditions cannot rely on a single authoritative narrative of continuity. Yet it cannot survive without any shared experiential orientation toward the future.

Relational continuity offers a middle path.

It affirms that different local communities carry different local inheritances - languages, rituals, moral sensibilities, cosmologies - while insisting that continuity itself is a shared responsibility. What must be held in common is not belief, but care for the conditions that allow life to continue meaningfully.

This reframes generational responsibility.

Children are no longer understood merely as private projects, lifestyle choices, or economic liabilities. They are participants in a shared future whose shape depends upon how present generations live together now. Even those who do not have children themselves remain responsible for the world into which others’ children will be born.

When we see American ICE patrols removing children from their families, and separating families from one another, what we see is the enforcement of a monoculture on other  cultures acting out dehumanization policies. The child, as well as the parent, and individual, understand themselves not to be valued nor loved, but a thing that is unwanted and removed from an unappreciative monoculture fearing for itself and not for the other.

In any civilization, such relational-pluralistic responsibility cannot be sustained by obligation alone. It requires hope in place of fear. Expansion over naïve dread. Trust over static imaginations of progress. And a quiet confidence that the future is still meaningfully open to formation.

III

Relational continuity cultivates this confidence by restoring depth to time. It resists both nostalgic fixation on a mythologized past and the flattening of time into an endless present. It invites people to experience themselves as links in a living chain of becoming - recipients of inherited gifts they did not create, and stewards of possibilities they will not fully see.

When this temporal imagination is lost, continuity collapses.

The past becomes either a burden or a weapon.

The future becomes either an abstraction or a threat.

The present becomes exhausted.

When meaninfulness is restored, even partially, generational desire becomes intelligible again.

People do not need certainty to commit to the future.

They need a world that feels worth committing to.

Relational continuity does not promise control over what comes next. It promises participation in shaping it. It affirms that while no generation can secure the future alone, each generation can contribute to the conditions under which life, meaning, and care may continue to arise.

In this way, continuity is not secured by authority, identity, or enforcement. It is sustained by love extended through time.

In the final section, we turn inward to the interior capacities required to sustain such a civilization - capacities formed through practice rather than imposed by decree.

---

IV. Relational Virtue

Responsibility, Care, and Civic Formation

I

If relational pluralism (as vs ethno-pluralism or mono-pluralism) names how difference is held, relational participation names how shared life is practiced, and relational continuity names how time is inhabited, then relational virtue names the interior capacities that make these possible.

Civilizations do not endure because they articulate the right principles. They endure because enough people acquire the dispositions required to live those principles without enforcement.

Virtue, in this sense, is not moral heroism.

It is relational competence.

Modern discourse often treats virtue as either anachronistic or authoritarian. It is associated with rigid codes, imposed norms, or moralism detached from lived reality. In reaction, many pluralistic societies retreat toward value-neutral administration, assuming that shared life can be sustained through procedural conduct alone.

This assumption fails. Cultural proceduralism can regulate/administrate behavior but they cannot form character. Relational virtue must reframe the concept entirely.

Virtue is no longer understood as obedience to inherited rules, nor as the cultivation of personal excellence in isolation. It is understood as the capacity to sustain relationship across difference over time.

Such capacity does not arise spontaneously - it must be formed and informed by positive, participatory, and relational experience of other cultures such as can be found in cosmopolitan urban settings of large, melting pot cities.

II

Relational virtue includes habits such as patience in disagreement, restraint in the exercise of power, attentiveness to the vulnerable, and willingness to assume responsibility without guarantees of return. These are not abstract ideals. They are skills learned through repeated participation in shared practices.

In pluralistic civilizations, these virtues cannot be assumed. They must be cultivated intentionally.

This is why relational participation matters so deeply. Practices of shared work, shared care, and shared deliberation do more than accomplish external goals. They shape the inner lives of participants. They teach what it feels like to depend on others without domination, to be accountable without humiliation, and to disagree without dehumanizing the other.

Without such formation, pluralism remains brittle.

• Difference becomes threatening rather than generative.
• Conflict escalates into moral panic.
• Responsibility is displaced onto institutions.
• Care is privatized.

Relational virtue counters this brittleness by restoring a sense of personal and corporate /communal/societal agency bound to responsibility.

Agency without responsibility fragments society.

Responsibility without agency suffocates it.

Relational virtue holds the two together.

It affirms that individuals matter - but not in isolation.

It affirms freedom - but not without obligation.

It affirms conviction - but not without humility.

III

This balance is especially crucial in religious and ideological contexts.

When convictions are detached from relational virtue, they harden into weapons. When virtue is detached from conviction, it thins into empathy. A relationally formed virtue allows convictions to remain strong without becoming coercive.

This is why love, understood relationally, is not an optional supplement to civic life. It is its sustaining force.

Love, in this context, does not mean affection or agreement. It means the willingness to remain present to others as others, even when difference persists. It is the discipline of holding space for shared becoming without insisting on control over outcomes.

Such love cannot be commanded - it must be learned.

And learning requires time, patience, and communities willing to form their members rather than merely manage them.

IV

Relational virtue therefore completes the arc of this essay.

Pluralism without virtue dissolves into fragmentation.

Participation without virtue collapses into exhaustion.

Continuity without virtue hardens into nostalgia.

But where relational virtue is cultivated, pluralistic civilizations can remain open without becoming incoherent, diverse without becoming divided, and stable without becoming static.

This does not guarantee success. But  it offers something more realistic and more demanding. It offers the possibility that shared life, though fragile and unfinished, may still be worth the work of sustaining.

---

Societies of Difference

No one told us how fragile
shared living would feel
once monolithic certainty

lost its voice to fear.

We learned to tolerate -
but we forgot how to

communicate and nurture.

Our artificial walls hardened

into perfunctory procedures,

our convictions thinned into

willed preferences.

We lived beside one another,

but not with one another.

We became strangers.

Underneath, something waited -
beneath the noise of distrust,
and the ache of separation.

A practice.
A table.
A listening that did not rush
to be right.

Not unity.
Not erasure.
Not peace without cost.

But the work of staying present
when difference remained.
The courage to care
without guarantees.

We cannot agree to sameness -

but we can agree to becoming,

as functioning communities

of care, of nourishment,

of learning and listening.

Time does not ask us to preserve

our beloved past,

but it does ask us

to carry it forward

with more open hands.

And if there is hope enough
to teach our children,
it will come in the way

of watching our parents,

and our communities,

love one another again.

Not as command,
but as invitation.

Not as pre-sold expectations,
but as a shared turning

with one another together
toward what can beautifully

become.

R.E. Slater
February 7, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

---

Bibliography

---

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books, 1966.

Eberstadt, Nicholas. Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2016.

Hanson, Victor Davis. The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America. New York: Basic Books, 2021.

Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.

Postrel, Virginia. The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. New York: Free Press, 1998.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.