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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 dogmaBut a direction of travel.A direction of outreach, invitation, humility, and togetherness.One that remains open enough to invite, and strong enough to endure.
We did not inherit answers.
We inherited too commonly,
A line where sky meets ground
and recedes as we walk
Truth did not leave us.
truth learns travel
Hope did not promise arrival.
It asked us to keep company
Between voices and
between what we think
Not agreement.
Not certainty.
But the work of staying open
long enough for meaning
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.
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