R. E. Slater - An Overview of Life, Thought, and Work (58)

ESSAY 58

"WHAT IS REALITY" SERIES

CONCLUSION OF ONTOLOGY SERIES

R.E. Slater

An Overview of Life, Thought, and Work

Writer, Theologian, Process Philosopher,

and Developer of Embodied Process Realism

If divinity is to mean anything, it must mean love,

or it must mean nothing at all.

- R.E. Slater

The task is not to construct a final system.

The task is to continue the inquiry.

- R. E. Slater, Embodied Process Realism Manifesto (2026)

Before meaning comes being;

and before interpretation comes reality.

- R. E. Slater, Embodied Process Realism Manifesto (2026)

Our eschatological ethos is to love.

To stand with those who are oppressed.

To stand against those who are oppressing.

It is that simple.

Love is our only calling

and Christian Hope.

- R.E. Slater

R. E. Slater is an American independent writer, blogger, and philosophical commentator whose work focuses on process philosophy, process theology, cosmology, metaphysics, religion, and contemporary culture. He is best known for maintaining the website Relevancy22, a long-running blog established in 2009 that explores the relationship between science, philosophy, theology, history, politics, and social thought.

Slater's writings have increasingly emphasized process-relational approaches to reality derived from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, contemporary cosmology, complexity theory, emergence studies, and open-relational theology. His later work has focused on the development of a philosophical framework known as Embodied Process Realism (EPR) and the multi-part Reality & Cosmology Series, an extended exploration of ontology, identity, meaning, consciousness, and metaphysics.

Intellectual Influences

Slater's work draws heavily upon the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and subsequent developments within process theology. Other recurring influences include contemporary discussions in emergence theory, complexity science, cosmology, consciousness studies, and open-relational approaches to theology and metaphysics.

Throughout his writings, Slater has explored the relationship between scientific understandings of reality and religious interpretations of existence, often arguing that philosophy, science, and theology should remain in ongoing dialogue rather than being treated as separate domains of inquiry.

Relevancy22

In 2009, Slater launched Relevancy22, an online publication devoted to the exploration of religion, philosophy, science, ethics, and culture. The site contains essays, book studies, commentaries, poems, diagrams, educational resources, and long-form philosophical projects.

Over time, the blog evolved from a primarily theological focus toward broader investigations of ontology, cosmology, emergence, process philosophy, and contemporary philosophical questions.

Major themes addressed on the site include:

• Process Philosophy
• Process Theology
• Open and Relational Theology
• Science and Religion
• Cosmology
• Consciousness Studies
• Metamodernism
• Democracy and Ethics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Biblical Studies and Religious History

Major Projects

Among Slater's largest projects are a number of multi-part philosophical and theological series.

Reality & Cosmology Series

The Reality & Cosmology Series is an extended philosophical investigation into the nature of reality. Organized across multiple sections and essays, the project examines questions concerning ontology, relation, coherence, embodiment, persistence, identity, value, meaning, consciousness, directionality, and metaphysics.

The series eventually served as the foundation for the development of Embodied Process Realism.

Evolution of Worship and Religion

This series traces the historical development of religious thought from prehistoric spirituality and early civilizations through classical philosophy, Christianity, modernity, and contemporary religious reflection.

Jonah Series

The Jonah Series applies ontological and process-relational themes to the biblical Book of Jonah. The project explores identity, rupture, descent, transformation, and reconciliation through both narrative and philosophical lenses.

Post-Whiteheadian Project

Slater has described a long-term effort to extend and reinterpret Whiteheadian process philosophy in light of contemporary developments in science, cosmology, emergence theory, consciousness studies, and cultural change.

Embodied Process Realism

During the development of the Reality & Cosmology Series, Slater began formulating a philosophical framework known as Embodied Process Realism (EPR).

EPR proposes that reality is fundamentally relational and that increasingly complex forms of existence emerge through a sequence of relation, coherence, embodiment, persistence, identity, meaning, and directionality. The framework was formally summarized in the Embodied Process Realism Manifesto (2026).

Selected Themes

Recurring themes in Slater's writings include:

• Reality as relational rather than atomistic
• Emergence and complexity
• Embodiment and persistence
• Consciousness and participation
• Open futures and non-deterministic directionality
• The relationship between science and theology
• Process-relational approaches to ethics and culture

Legacy and Continuing Work

Slater's ongoing projects continue to explore the intersection of ontology, metaphysics, cosmology, theology, and cultural development. His later writings increasingly focus on the philosophical implications of emergence, participation, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and open-ended cosmological becoming.

On vacation, Feb 2026

An eco-tour (transitional, tropical) hike on bad ground.

Hi.

My wife and I are away for a few weeks. When returning I intend to finish "What is reality" series and "How is cosmogical reality processual?" along with about about 30 other essays and commentaries.

These forthcoming essays will all be layered, organized, and outlined with one another... they just are not written yet. They are also related all the way back to all the published essays ftom last July forwards. If you wish to catch up, start with the Frege articles, July 2025, and read the next 150 essays chronologically.

Also, check out the many hundreds and hundreds of articles using the topic listing on the right. To assist topical readings, the listed Indexes in the topics-listing summarize previously written series as a group. When I set out to deconstruct - and - reconstruct Christianity I have done this completely without loss of faith. Just the opposite. I wish to strengthen the faith of millions. In affect, I have properly updated and contemporized today's faith.

There are also poetry articles here at Relevancy22 and a completely separate poetry site on google. To find it, just type "r.e. slater + poetry." Its my alter-ego site when I need a break.

Otherwise, be patient. I need the rest, and I need to be unplugged and decompress. My first three days I simply slept and slept. Apparently I had become exhausted.

Blessings!

R.E. Slater
Feb 20, 2026
Central and South America

   

Camels are not stinky, but riding is uncomfortable.

Racing in the Baja on UTX's.

RE Slater - Personal Update

https://www.maryfreebed.com/

To my readers,

Hello,

I've had a bit of a setback this month and last. Though I was productive through the month of February I was undergoing at the same time a very difficult foot-and-ankle infectious pain due to a surgical infection inhabiting those spaces over the past nine years at my first surgery.

Though I have had ups-and-downs over the past nine years these past several weeks have become unbearable from February through mid-April. I've experienced more pain than I could humanly endure. Consequently, I decided to go with another healthcare provider and all that they offered, including a new doctor, who could give to me counsel and direction. Which he did and who I was fortunate to find.

Basically, I knew I could no longer save my foot-and-ankle without risking internal organ damage because of PICC lines to be placed into my heart and all the heavy medication required to get me healthy again. This would not be an avenue I wished to revisit having had this done several times in the past.

So with my spouse attending my appointments with me, we have decided to lose the foot-and-ankle limb by having it removed.

This was done a week ago.

The healthcare system I switched to also offered an amazing rehabilitation center for amputees and people struggling with various disabilities. So once losing the foot-and-ankle my health issues have disappeared... although I have now traded a new set of health circumstances in recovering from a lost limb and learning to be self-caretaking for the next two months.

Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital

Restoring Hope and Freedom

After staying 3.5 days in surgical care I was then transferred to the disability center wherein I was able to graduate rapidly into self-care at home over a period of 4.5 days. This means I came home yesterday to struggle with residual pain and self-management issues. To help with any offsets, the rehabilitation center I had stayed in is providing "At-Home" nursing care, OT, PT, and nursing aides as needed.

So, as of yesterday, it has been one week since my radical surgery and recovery. I am at home presently working towards better health. This means in two months my half-leg should be healed and I will be able to be fitted with several foot-and-ankle prosthetics. Which also means I will be re-enrolled as an outpatient two or three days a week to learn how to walk again.

By mid-July of 2024, and after four months from first to last, I should be fully mobile with only ensuing health checkups over the next year or two.

And as I can, I will return to this website soon to work out what process philosophy, theology, process sciences, and all other disciplines and human pursuits might look like when using Whitehead's "philosophy of a living organism" (e.g., the universe; the earth; and ourselves as evolving processual entities).

Till then, use all the resources here to begin your own processual journey. Please pass along suggestions, needs, and ideas in the comment section.

To comment, you have to be part of Google's membership which is free. When I see the comments - and if they are appropriate to the content - I will post them. If not, I will delete them. If users wish to speak to one another I can adjust my site to allow for conversation but discourage any frivolous comments or weblinks not pertinent to the subject matter.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater

April 19, 2024

R.E. Slater - A Country Idyll (prose)

A Country Idyll

by R.E. Slater

Today is one of those really cold wintry days in Michigan where time is a given and outdoor adventures are kept to a minimum unless you have the proper warm flannelled clothes, heavy coat, thick boots, hat, and scarf, and the personal ability to endure the cold and actually enjoy it. 

 

Myself, though I am growing old, I still love winter, its wonder, solitude, silence, and ferocity. The worse it gets the more I love it. In childhood if there was a raging blizzard blowing and drifting outside I and my brother were in the "teeth of it" as we sledded down our tall hills to then scramble up them, then down, again-and-again until we tired. 

 

And when not sliding we were testing our "daring do" abilities by jumping into deep snowdrifts nineteen feet down trying to hit bottom (we never did) to see if we could scale back up them or fight our way out of their massif miens. But do not worry, those hillside drifts were skinny, more tall than wide. Four feet at best, sometimes more. 

 

Across our hills lay the old 150-year-old barn where the winds would gather to crest the frozen fence lines and blow across the hill tops ringing the wetland below. There, on the hills or up at the barn we could expect 25 to 30 feet of snowdrift four to six foot deep blown lengthwise and down the contour of the hills. When younger we built very long luge runs bored like tunnels through the bottoms of the drifts. And within their interiors we built one and two-person snow rooms from early morning until late at night when the bunny rabbits hopped about, and we could watch them like gophers from our dens. Later, when older, we learned how to "bust through their tops" with a snowmobile gunning the engine straight up the big hills, then slamming the drift front-on, trying to carry 30 or so feet of air before landing on the downward side of the sloped hill. 

 

We had a lot of fun during the winters. Dad would plow the drives and stack large snow piles by the dilapidated chicken coop or barn and as the plowed snow grew higher and higher in height and girth we waited and waited until pulling out the iron shovel-spades from nearby garage, began carving out our own majestic snow castle; or play king-on-the-hill like we did at school, to be pushed down rolling all the way to the bottom of the massive snow pile. 

 

And on icy days when not using our Radio Flyer metal-runner sleds on the hills, we would glide across the flat icy fields steering around tufted island of wild grasses where the snow gave in and stopped our fun. Sometimes we ran a hundred feet and sometimes we never stopped until we reached the icicled fence lines. It was a lot of fun. 

And then there were the holidays of Christmas and forced winter school closures where we waxed luxuriant to play board games through the morning till bored then bundled up to visit our grand old grandma next door bereft of granddad back when we were too young to understand. 

 

She would watch us slide down her chimney's "coal shute" built into the house as an anchorage to the outer chimney; or make labyrinthine mazes with our booted feet, scooting across the crusty snow working around-and-around or, in-and-out, then play catch-me-tag as we scampered about the maze trying to catch one another. 

 

When cold, we would fly into the old farmhouse's back "work room" or "ready room" where dad, his brothers and sisters, and my uncles and aunts five generations back, would gather to dress for the fields and dairy barns; or undress and clean up after a long day of farming and husbandry. 

 

Most days, we flew in to warm up our little bodies. Which delighted grandma no end. We would peel off our wet outer clothes and iced-up buckle boots to be lured within to Graham Crackers and milk as we explored again the old house with its framed pictures and family rooms. 

 

And on special days when coming indoors we might find grandma working about two very large, vat-like, and rounded laundry tubs filled with steaming hot water rising about her fragile frame and filling the ready-room with much need heat. There we would watch with child-like eyes grandma move about the tubs stirring the wet clothes in the hot waters or winding them through a sturdy pre-1930s hand wringer before clothes pinning all to a strung line about the clapboard room. 

 

She always gave a wry, toothy smile from her diminutive figure clad in thin gingham dress before measuring ourselves to her frame shoulder to shoulder to see if we might be as tall as she! By age ten we had caught up with our beloved "second mom" before scampering down the cement floor hall to a back anteroom where an inside - and importantly, an unfrozen hand pump served up the best of coldest waters in a speckled blue enameled tin cup. 

 

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it... 

And if our busy dad wasn't on the roads policing or, up at the fire barns cleaning up the ash soot of the fire equipment and trucks after a fire, or driving our school bus morning and afternoon, we might find him up at cold barn in the dark of night servicing the plow tractor so it would be ready for use. He would add oil, gas, grease, check the tire chains, and always place a trickle charger on the battery to keep it in good health on cold nights. 

 

Looking around the night-filled blackened barn lay hundred-year whatnot and older, inexplicable, paraphernalia. The kind of stuff you see in Midwest antique stores. To us, it was junk, much used, and never removed by the hands that had placed it there years and years and years ago. There it lay with thick dust upon it underneath a mouldy atmosphere of age. 

 

While dad worked, we would climb up a rickety wooden rung ladder nailed into the beams which rose above the iron implements of plow, disk or tractor, thirty feet into the air, then fling upon a heavy 3' X 3'-foot double planked door to gain entry into the loft. Within, what once held hay now held more disused antiques. On summer days the space was filled with floating/wafting dust motes... but in the black, only the shafts of light from the dim bulb below gained entry through the upper planked floor. 

 

One especially good memory I have is that on the worst of the winter storms or summer gales, I would brave the elements to gain the barn, squeeze through between the jammed tractor doors, and sit in the loft above listening to the old barn groan and moan telling me of its hoary memories as I might imagine them from the dissolute litter lying about me. 

In my mid-twenties I sadly tore down the old wood barn. We were selling all our homesteaded acreage as all my relatives were dying or too old to keep the farm with their day jobs. We had already sold the old sixty-foot Quonset steel barn which held the dairy herd below under heavy planked floor. It had been disassembled and rebuilt north of us on an active pig farm. Forty years later I was blessed to walk within its structure at the consent of the owner who had torn it down, and with my cousin and wife, we fell silent and simply listened to the movement of the old iron beams swaying and creaking for a while. It was the finest of symphonies to our humble hearts and ears. 

 

As I took down my heritage, I first removed the attached-and-slated corn crib then proceeded to remove the ancient, boarded siding and overlapping ribs. Dad wanted all the old nails removed and bucketed, which took some time. Once stripped of naked of cladding I next tried to undowel the 6/8" wooden tendon pins and the massive 14/16" beam pins to no avail. Worse, I could see all the work down 150 years ago by my ancestor who had hand-adzed each beam across the length of all four of its sides. This was truly a labor I did not like nor one I had wished to do. 

 

Watching, my dad and his brother (my uncle) suggested pulling down the structure with the old tractor. It was an old, rusted Farmall M that had been well cared for and never spent one night outside in the rain or snow. We strapped a length of chains to the back frame of the tractor then commenced tugging-and-pulling 8 of the 12 main upright beams holding everything up: Imagine walking alongside a broken, tottering structure to attach chains to several corner and side beams... we left the interior beams alone of course. 

 

One by one we broke the bottoms of the grand, noble, upright beams, until the whole skeleton finally gave in along with the falling tinned plated roof. In our moment of glory, we each found a deep sadness which comes from living too long. I have grieved for years over the loss of our pioneered land, our farm buildings, my grandparents, and the many overwhelming memories of family and friends working the fields and gardens together, picnicking, hunting, or playing baseball on the hay fields.  

 

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it... 

To grant homage to the pre-industrial, agrarian pioneering days of yesteryear, I was listening one winter day in early December to my schoolteacher read to me in second of third grade the wintry idyll, Snowbound, by John Greenleaf Whittier. As I sat at my old fold-top desk listening to the verse's tones and lights I felt a deep, inner affinity for the words and imagery being read. 

 

Here, as my own generations had done for many years, in this simple one-room school built 150 years ago by my ancestors; where I walked every morning and mid-afternoon across the hay and grain fields, and dairy pastures; climbing up-and-over the boxed-wired rotting fence posts and lines; or drawing through the barbed-wired and rusted post fence lines; grudgingly wading through wet morning dews of field clover with my lunchbox in one hand and books in the other; where my pants, thin socks, and worn shoes took all morning to dry; here, I fell in love with a well-scripted verse by a poet I never knew. And though I have tried my own hand at this written art I realize it is only for the gifted few who have the muse and verve within the souls which might spill their words across the gilded page welling-up deeply held, visceral feelings we thought had long died within us long ago. 

 

So, here, at the start of January's dark wintry days and blacker, moonless nights, is a poem you may, or may not like. But at the poetry site I am directing you too, you may find other poems to explore, read, muse, or share.

 

To cold and wintry travellers

seeking comfort the warming

fires at day's end, clothed

socked feet, flannel shirt,

bound round 'versed dreams,

of fairer days when yesteryear's

youth was nigh;

wreathed loss loves forged

lingering fortitudes well-scented in

benighted, florid moments,

tranced distant memories dulled

the intervening years of a lived

life, yearning a christening trove

of beloved sights and sounds,

dear smells and touch, stirring

living eye and soul long forgotten

trysts which once enflamed a

child's heart it's first footfalls

of wandering adventure, lit a

grandfather's kind eye's hearty

embrace granting permission to

live one's best possible life

before holding yon next

generation of beating hearts,

flying hands, and happy feet,

pinching weathered ears, or

wrinkled elbows for fun,

assurance, and fond farewell.

R.E. Slater

January 16, 2024

Rev. May 1, 2024

*To Wes, my heart and soul, and

  to Levi and Titus, my faraway loves...

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

John Greenleaf Whittier - Snowbound, A Winter Idyl