Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Becoming: A Processual Guide - Part 1-6 (Part 1)

Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Becoming:

A Processual Guide

PART 1-6

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change,

and to preserve change amid order.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Order or disorder are not inherently good nor bad -

they gain meaning only through movement toward

value, creativity, and compassion.

- RE Slater

This essay forms part of a five-part series titled “Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Becoming: A Processual Guide” - an exploration of how knowledge, ignorance, disruption, and renewal shape our individual and collective journeys of becoming.

We live in a fractured age marked by contested truths, rising authoritarianism, epistemic breakdowns, and the erosion of shared trust. In such a world, ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge; it is often manufactured, wielded, and weaponized. Yet ignorance and disruption, though dangerous, are not only threats. They are also invitations: to listen more deeply, to question false certainties, and to disrupt systems not just destructively, but generatively.

Process thought teaches us that reality is always in the making—open-ended, relational, and co-created. In this spirit, this guide begins with two conceptual maps: epistemology (how we come to know) and agnotology (how ignorance is socially constructed and maintained). These maps are not abstractions; they are lived terrains shaped by power, culture, and history.

As the guide unfolds, we turn toward the destructive dynamics of ignorance, paying special attention to the toxic disruptions of MAGAism. These movements have frayed the social fabric—damaging lives, polarizing communities, undermining truth, and destabilizing democratic norms. But even in this rupture, there is potential. Disruption is not always decay; it can be a clearing, a space from which new ways of knowing, relating, and organizing can emerge.

The final section offers a processual framework for positive disruption—not as a violent act of rejection, but as a compassionate disturbance of what is toxic, rigid, or unjust. It invites us to unsettle false constructions of:

• Personal identity (formed through fear, division, or supremacy)

• Societal myths (of nationalism, exceptionalism, or purity)

• Church structures (that privilege hierarchy over relational grace)

• Political authoritarianism (which thrives on dehumanization and control)

• Theological dogma (that reduces the divine to fixed, exclusionary systems)

Throughout, we affirm that to know is not to conquer, but to engage—to enter into the world’s complexity with clarity and care. To not-know is not failure, but the ground of humility and openness. And to disrupt is not always to destroy, but often to clear space for what can heal and grow.

This processual guide invites you to hold these tensions creatively. To live them. To become through them. It is not a roadmap toward certainty, but a rhythm of living: knowing, unknowing, and becoming - together.

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Preface

Some fractures are sudden. Others are slow — accumulating over years, hidden beneath polite silence or fortified by loud certainties. We are living in the midst of both. Truths once trusted are now contested. Communities once whole are splintered. And beneath the noise, many carry a quiet ache: a longing for clarity, for courage, for connection.

This is not a time for easy answers. It is a time for deeper seeing. For learning how knowledge is formed — and how ignorance is cultivated. For noticing not only what we believe, but why we believe it, and how belief can be bent toward harm or healing.

This collection is not a doctrine, but a rhythm. It does not promise mastery, but movement. Through the languages of process thought, theology, and social critique, it seeks to make space — for unlearning, for disrupting, for becoming.

We begin not with conclusions, but with attentiveness. We listen for what truth sounds like beneath distortion, what wisdom feels like in the presence of humility, and what love requires when the ground is shifting.

This is a guide for those willing to walk through uncertain doorways. For those who sense that knowing is not conquest, and not-knowing is not failure. For those who believe that disruption can be holy when it clears the ground for something truer to grow.

Let us begin.

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Mapping Knowing and Not-Knowing

PART 1

by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT-5

We live in a fractured age — one marked by contested truths, toxic disruptions, and deep cultural divides. In such a time, both knowing and not-knowing matter. Knowledge alone is not enough; ignorance itself must be understood, for it is as socially created as knowledge. Our task is not only to resist toxic beliefs and acts but to disrupt them positively, opening pathways toward renewal.

This collection gathers reflections on epistemology and agnotology, on personal and communal identity, on church structures, political life, and theology. It explores how ignorance is manufactured, how toxic movements disrupt democracy and community, and how process thought offers a way forward: not by clinging to rigid certainties, but by embracing reality as a dynamic becoming.

At its heart, this work is a guide to living humbly with both knowledge and ignorance, courageously disrupting what harms, and co-creating what heals. In the rhythm of knowing and not-knowing, we may discover the seeds of becoming together.

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I - How We Know (Epistemologies)

Every great advance in natural knowledge

has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

- Thomas Huxley

• Rationalism — Rationalists argue that human reason and innate structures of thought are the deepest sources of knowledge. Thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz emphasized that certain truths (e.g., mathematics, logic) can be grasped independently of sensory experience. Rationalism trusts the mind’s capacity to discover universal principles. 🔗 Wikipedia: Rationalism

• Empiricism — Empiricists like Locke and Hume stressed that all knowledge begins with experience. Sense impressions provide the raw data for reflection, from which abstract concepts emerge. This view grounds science in observation and experiment, but also faces challenges (e.g., induction). 🔗 Wikipedia: Empiricism

• Foundationalism — Foundationalism seeks certainty by building knowledge upon “basic beliefs” (self-evident, incorrigible, or directly given). From these secure starting points, further beliefs are justified. While appealing, critics argue that no belief is beyond challenge. 🔗 Wikipedia: Foundationalism

• Coherentism — Coherentists deny the need for indubitable foundations, claiming that beliefs are justified when they cohere within a larger web of interconnected beliefs. The strength of justification comes from mutual support. Critics warn this may allow circularity or relativism. 🔗 Wikipedia: Coherentism

• Infinitism — A less common view, infinitism argues that justification requires an infinite chain of non-repeating reasons. While seemingly impractical, it avoids the pitfalls of circular reasoning or arbitrary foundational stopping points. 🔗 Wikipedia: Infinitism

• Pragmatism — Pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey defined truth as what “works” in lived practice. Ideas are validated by their consequences and utility, not by correspondence to some static essence. Knowledge is always provisional, tested by experience, and open to revision. 🔗 Wikipedia: Pragmatism

• Naturalized Epistemology — Quine argued that epistemology should be continuous with the natural sciences, especially psychology and cognitive science. Instead of seeking ultimate justification, we should study how humans actually form beliefs and learn. 🔗 Wikipedia: Naturalized Epistemology

• Reliabilism — Reliabilists claim that beliefs are justified if they are produced by processes that are generally reliable (e.g., memory, perception, logical inference). It shifts the focus away from internal certainty toward external dependability. 🔗 Wikipedia: Reliabilism

• Evidentialism — Evidentialists hold that a belief is justified only if supported by sufficient evidence. W.K. Clifford’s dictum remains central: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” 🔗 Wikipedia: Evidentialism

• Virtue Epistemology — This view emphasizes the qualities of the knower, such as open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and courage. Knowledge depends not just on having true beliefs, but on being a virtuous knower. 🔗 Wikipedia: Virtue Epistemology

• Social & Feminist Epistemology — These approaches stress that knowledge is not purely individual but socially situated. Who counts as a “knower,” whose voices are excluded, and how power shapes inquiry all matter for truth. 🔗 Wikipedia: Feminist Epistemology

• Bayesian Epistemology — Models belief as degrees of probability, updated mathematically in response to new evidence. Bayesian reasoning is influential in science, AI, and decision-making. 🔗 Wikipedia: Bayesian Epistemology

• Process Epistemology — Process views reject static certainty and treat knowledge as relational, contextual, and always unfolding. Knowing is an event of becoming, shaped by interaction, creativity, and openness to novelty. 🔗 Discussion: Process Epistemology.

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IA - Processual Perspective on Knowing (Epistemologies)

In process philosophy, knowing is not static or isolated, but relational, temporal, and participatory. It is an unfolding process—a continuous becoming—where the knower and the known co-create meaning through experience. Rather than aiming for an immutable certainty, knowledge is approached as a living act within an evolving context.

Traditional epistemologies such as empiricism, rationalism, or foundationalism often seek fixed grounds for certainty. Process thought reorients these toward fluid grounds of becoming, where truth is not located in isolated facts or unchanging principles, but in the creative integration of past experience, present interpretation, and future possibility.

The processual view values pragmatic engagement, contextual insight, and mutual prehension—the felt interrelation between subject and object. It honors naturalized, social, and feminist epistemologies for recognizing the embeddedness of knowledge in lived experience and shared structures. It also integrates Bayesian, virtue, and process epistemologies as tools for navigating change, uncertainty, and emergence.

In this framework, knowing is always unfinished—a creative advance into novelty, ever open to revision and enrichment. Truth becomes less about correspondence and more about coherence within a dynamic whole, oriented toward value, relational adequacy, and compassionate application.

Thus, to “know” in process is not to grasp and hold, but to participate and evolve—to move with reality rather than master it.

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*Process Agnotology = A Process Theory of Ignorance

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II - How We Do Not Know (Theories of Ignorance & Limits)

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

- Francis Bacon

Ignorance is not simply lack of knowledge but the refusal

to know, a turning away from what unsettles.

- Charles Mills

Here we survey major theories of knowledge (epistemologies) and of ignorance (agnotologies), showing how each frames the human quest for truth. We end with a processual perspective: knowledge as dynamic, ignorance as horizon.

• Agnotology — Coined by historian Robert Proctor, agnotology is the study of how ignorance is deliberately created or sustained. Tobacco companies, fossil fuel lobbies, and authoritarian regimes have all manufactured doubt to maintain power. Ignorance is not mere absence; it is often intentional.
  🔗 Wikipedia: Agnotology

• Gettier Problems — Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper demonstrated that “justified true belief” is insufficient for knowledge. In his famous examples, someone may hold a belief that is both true and justified, yet still correct only by luck. This forced philosophers to refine what counts as knowledge.🔗 IEP: Gettier Problems

• Underdetermination — Evidence often supports multiple, competing theories equally well. For example, early astronomy could be explained by both Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. This suggests data alone may not determine truth. 🔗 Stanford Encyclopedia: Underdetermination

• Duhem–Quine Thesis — Scientific hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation, but only in conjunction with auxiliary assumptions. When predictions fail, we may not know whether the core theory or the background assumptions are to blame. 🔗 Wikipedia: Duhem–Quine Thesis

• Theory-Ladenness of Observation — All observation is filtered by prior concepts, assumptions, and theories. There is no “neutral seeing”; what we perceive is shaped by interpretation.

• Incommensurability — Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend argued that scientific paradigms can be so different in concepts and methods that they cannot be directly compared. This challenges ideas of cumulative progress.

• Skepticism — Philosophical skepticism doubts whether certainty is ever possible. From ancient skeptics to Descartes’ doubts about perception, skepticism highlights the fragility of justification.

• Problem of Induction — David Hume showed that there is no logical guarantee that the future will resemble the past. Induction (drawing generalizations from experience) works pragmatically but lacks certainty.

• Fallibilism — The principle that all human knowledge is provisional. Even our best-supported beliefs may be mistaken, and therefore must remain open to revision.

• Epistemic Luck — Knowledge requires more than truth and justification; it must avoid being correct “by accident.” Gettier-style examples highlight this vulnerability.

• Epistemic Closure Failure — Challenges the idea that knowledge is closed under known entailment. You may know you have hands, but not be able to rule out being a brain in a vat — suggesting closure does not always hold.

• Cognitive Bias & Heuristics — Psychological research shows that humans rely on mental shortcuts (heuristics) that distort judgment, such as confirmation bias or availability bias. These produce systematic ignorance.

• Standpoint Blindness — When dominant perspectives marginalize or silence others, whole domains of knowledge are lost. Feminist standpoint theory highlights how excluding oppressed groups sustains collective ignorance.

• Testimonial Injustice — Miranda Fricker’s term for when prejudice leads us to discredit someone’s testimony. This silences voices and perpetuates ignorance.

• Power/Ideology — Michel Foucault and others note that what counts as “truth” is shaped by structures of power. Knowledge is never neutral; it is entangled in systems of domination.

• Radical Uncertainty — Some realities are not just unknown but unknowable in advance, such as emergent phenomena in complex systems. This challenges rational planning.

• The Unknowable — Some realities lie beyond human comprehension: Kant’s noumenon, divine mystery, or aspects of quantum mechanics. This humbles reason and expands awe..

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IIA - Processual Perspective on Ignorance and Epistemic Limits

In process philosophy, knowledge is not a fixed possession, but a dynamic unfolding—a continual becoming shaped by experience, relation, and interpretation. It is always in flux, emerging through interactions with the world, others, and ourselves.

From this view, ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge but the horizon that defines the boundaries of our current awareness. It is not a failure, but a necessary and even productive space: the edge from which novelty arises and where learning becomes possible. Just as the future draws the present forward, ignorance invites inquiry and calls us into deeper participation with the world.

Where traditional epistemologies seek certainty or static truth, a processual epistemology embraces contingency, context, and growth. It acknowledges that knowing is always partial and that un-knowing is not an obstacle, but part of the creative tension that fuels transformation. Ignorance, rightly engaged, is the soil of wisdom.

In this way, process thought encourages epistemic humility, ethical openness, and imaginative engagement. It teaches us that not knowing is not the end of understanding—but its beginning.

Processual Meaning in Motion, Part 3

Processual Meaning in Motion:

Frege, Process and Developing

a Living Language

Part 3

Metamodern Theosophy:

Semantic Reinterpretation in Process Philosophy

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

return to Part 1

continue from Part 2

RES

How might process theosophy (discussed in Part 1) address classical Christian thought using Frege's semantics so that the hidden or the sublime might be heightened or expanded?

Chat GPT

This is a rich and profound question - inviting us to explore how process theosophy might use Frege’s semantic framework to reframe and deepen classic Christian thought, particularly in revealing the hidden and sublime meanings that traditional theology often flattens or misrepresents.

Let’s approach this in four layers:

🔹 1. Frege’s Semantic Triad and Theology

Recall Frege’s triad:

• Sign (Zeichen): The linguistic form (e.g., "God," "salvation," "resurrection")

• Sense (Sinn): The conceptual content or mode of presentation (e.g., “God as sovereign ruler” vs. “God as relational becoming”)

• Reference (Bedeutung): The real entity or truth the word points to (e.g., God, actual redemptive transformation, etc.)

In traditional theology:

• The sign is often treated as fixed and sacred.

• The sense is inherited dogmatically (creedal).

• The reference is presumed to be metaphysically static and absolute.

But this locks meaning into closed containers - mistaking orthodoxy’s sense for the fullness of divine reference.

🔹 2. Process Theosophy: The Recovery of the Sublime Sense

Process theosophy, especially grounded in Whiteheadian metaphysics, challenges this static approach. It posits:

• God is not a static object but an evolving relational reality - luring creation toward novelty, justice, beauty.

• Religious language is symbolic and unfolding, not final.

• Revelation is ongoing, not fixed and closed.

Thus, process theosophy decouples sign from rigid sense. It reopens theological signs (e.g., “glory,” “judgment,” “Christ”) to new, dynamic senses that more accurately resonate with the actual reference: a co-creative, persuasive divine reality which is always in process, evolving and becoming towards redemptive fullness.

➤ Frege’s model helps process thought reveal:

• That the traditional sense of Christian terms is often misaligned with their reference in lived, relational experience.

• That true sublimity - the divine lure: reality's unfolding beauty - has been trapped in stale or moralistic senses of words.

• That "misunderstood subliminals" are often the true depth behind the signs, long ignored by creedal literalism.

🔹 3. Bringing Forth the Hidden: Theopoetic Application

Let’s apply this through an example:

Word/Sign: Salvation

• Classical “Salvation”  = Escape from hell; legal pardon God’s saving act in Christ

• Processual “Salvation” = Transformative participation in divine life; an ongoing relational becoming into divine harmony

Inplication:

• The sign is the same.

• The reference, God’s redemptive activity, is arguably the same.

• But the sense in process thought is far more sublime, hidden, evolving, and more existentially true than the juridical framework of classic theology.

🔹 4. Theosophic Implication: From Public Misunderstanding to Sublime Realization

In this light, processual theosophy becomes a hermeneutics of uncovering:

• It re-signifies theological language so it aligns with a living divine reference.

• It invites mystagogy, not dogma - guiding people into the unfolding mystery, rather than enclosing them in fixed dogmatic senses.

• It restores the sublime not as supernatural spectacle, but as emerging/emergent presence in becoming.

This re-enchantment isn’t irrational... it’s supra-rational, poetic, relational, open. It takes what was publicly known (the sign), confronts the classically-and-Platonically misaligned sense, and reinterprets the meaning processually to reflect the truer reference: That God is a God ever in transformatively loving process with-and-alongside the world.

✨ Summary in Fregean Terms:

Process theology reclaims theologically "closed" signs from their fossilized senses, realigns them with the living reference of God-and-creation's divine becoming, thus revealing the hidden sublimity previously veiled by millennia of dogmatic misuse.

What the Sign Forgot

A Fregean Theosophy in Verse

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

> The word was sung - salvation true,

a symbolic sound all faithful knew

It rang in pews, in solemn creeds,

but missed divinity's life in whisper needs.

> For sense was shaped in courts and kings,

of wrath and rules and mortal things;

That forged heavy chains from fear and guilt,

miscalling it love O' wretched thing.

> Yet still the sign had deeper delves and dreams,

which meaning flowed 'neath all living things;

As justice danced in mercy’s fire,

yet a loving God transfixed all souls' desire.

Not iron gates, but gardens wide and flowing,

nor fiery wrath, but bounteous rivers deep and true;

A heavenly process filled with hearts renewing,

not saved from hell but saved into creation's mystery.

Having traced salvation's hidden frame,

from broken words to living impress;

Though symboled sign yet remains -

it's sense expands Love's divining reference.

The Sign that Grew Wings

A Fregean Theosophy in Verse

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

The sign once stood like carved tablet stone,
cold syllables beneath Almighty's throne.
But time has turned the world askew -
breaking meaning from it's granite script.

The sense now sings in layered tones,
not fixed, but enfolding like winged flames.
In consuming reference, unchained, unbound,

across lively acts met within loving hands.

Let us then behold divine's signs grow wings,
to flutter and soar beyond the breath of men.
For only when we dare re-learn, re-vision,
can God be truly beheld salvation's meaning.

Finale

What began with Frege’s precision ends in metamodern resonance. Meaning, once seen as static correspondence, becomes living coherence in motion. Through processual theosophy, theology returns to life - not as defense of doctrine, but as participatory artistry within divine enfolding. In Fregian Process, signs evolve, senses deepen, and references emerge within deepening relationships.

This is theology reborn:

not in the preservation of hardened meaning - but in its renewal.

Not in the defense of fixed truths - but within the maturation of becoming.

In Frege’s logic, meaning was the bridge between word and world.

In processual theosophy, meaning is the world becoming lively word.

- R.E. Slater & ChatGPT 

 

How Pluralism Aides Education: Restructuring Dialogue in an Age of Populism

How Pluralism Aides Education:

Restructuring Dialogue in an Age of Populism

How Democracy Thrives Between Breadth and Identity

R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

Introduction

A democracy thrives when its institutions cultivate broad, pluralistic dialogue. Regional universities and colleges, by their very design, open students to multiple perspectives and encourage civic responsibility. Yet, alongside these institutions of breadth exist communities, organizations, and churches that often narrow vision, collapsing pluralism into exclusivism in order to match a preferred identity. When churches in particular sacralize partisan politics, as they have lately done, a heretical form of faith emerges - one that undermines both the gospel and the constitutional order. The initial efforts may have been sincerely undertaken at first, but they have metastasized into a national cancer affecting America's national institutions and very constitutional democracy. It no longer is a simple question of new ideas challenging older beliefs, but has become a structural contest between institutions which nurture pluralism vs. institutions which can erode the very same.

In the past, organic roles had been switched between church and state - even as they have again today under maga-rights pursuants. Churches which once led against slavery, and for abolition, the women's vote, and the removal of child labor from dangerous factory settings, are today leading against the humanitarian rights of migrants, transgender and gay populations, women's rights to medical care, minority rights to equality and justice, and even healthful earth-care initiatives. For any democracy to become more than ambition, they must practically create dialogue across all community sectors. Where this concerns education, it must recenter between universities of breadth to culturized communities polarized between their faith and practice. This must necessarily include all media sources as well as educating voices as they compete with ideologues and their beliefs.

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1. Universities as Custodians of Pluralism

Regional universities are uniquely structured to foster openness. By design, they gather students and faculty from across social, economic, and cultural spectra, creating hubs of pluralism even when they are not elite or global in reach. These institutions are (democratically) mandated by accreditation standards, curricular breadth, and research expectations to present students with multiple, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints. Academic freedom, though often contested, stands as a public trust - a safeguard which prevents universities from collapsing into syncretic echo chambers.

Pluralism here is not accidental; it is built into any democratized educational system. Whether through general education requirements, interdisciplinary seminars, or exposure to global literature, students are encouraged to encounter the unfamiliar. For many, a university classroom may be the first place they will meet someone of another religion, race, or political philosophy unless their family culture had previously reciprocated this effort in their formative years of childhood and teens. These new encounters and settings can be significant, perhaps unsettling, but vital when advancing towards maturation across a breadth of subjects, disciplines, endeavors, and entrepreneurship.

Case illustration: Consider the way many regional universities in the Midwest and South function as “first-contact zones” for rural students. A farm student from Iowa may share a dorm with an international exchange student from Nigeria; or, a first-generation Appalachian student may debate policy with a professor shaped by cosmopolitan city life. These exchanges are rarely perfect, but they model the democratic promise: difference need not lead to division; but can lead to dialogue.

Application: In this sense, universities are democratic crossroads. They normalize dialogue as the lifeblood of civic life, preparing students to inhabit a constitutional democracy in which diversity is inevitable and multi-environmental dialogue as indispensable to living in the postmodern world of the 21st century.

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2. Communities as Mediators of Breadth

Localized communities, organizations, and churches, however, function differently. While universities broaden horizons, focused communities tend to narrow them. What is learned in the classroom is filtered through local histories, economic anxieties, cultural assumptions, and pervasive beliefs. Cosmopolitan ideas are often re-translated into manageable, localized forms, reshaping acquired information into digestible, localized stories that may either resonate with lived experience or create tension within family and community.

Statedly, communities provide vital stability and identity. They preserve traditions, anchor relationships, and offer "safe-continuity" in a rapidly changing world. But this very strength can also become both a  personal as well as corporate liability. Stability can ossify into insularity, parochialism, provincialism, even inflexibility and sectarian myopia. The global horizon can shrink down into narrow cultural views where outside perspectives are treated with suspicion and hostility.

Case illustration: When debates about climate change reach small manufacturing towns, they are often reframed not as global crises but as threats to local jobs or ways of life. What universities present as scientific consensus, local communities may interpret as elitist interference. The same data, filtered through local experience, takes on new meaning.

Application: Here the civic imagination is tested. Will openness be preserved, or will it collapse into the comfort of sameness? Communities, caught between the breadth of universities and the closed-mindedness of churches, serve as the mediating ground where the battle for pluralism is often won or lost.

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3. Churches as Ideological Fortresses

Within local churches, the narrowing dynamic often hardens into ideology. Churches are deeply intimate networks of belonging, where trust is reinforced through ritual, authority, and shared moral commitments. These qualities make churches powerful communities of care, but they also render them vulnerable to ideological capture. A capture that often goes against it's own virility and self-care.

When preferred partisan ideas enter the communal sanctuary, they are not merely discussed but can often become sacralized. A political stance becomes a “biblical truth.” A policy preference becomes a divine mandate. Once internalized through sermons, small groups, or prayer meetings, these ideas acquire moral force beyond debate.

Case illustration: In recent years, many churches have recast public health measures, election integrity, or immigration policy as spiritual battles. Masks were not medical devices but signs of tyranny. Voting rights were not constitutional debates but matters of good versus evil. Immigration was framed not as an economic or humanitarian issue but as a threat to Christian identity. In each case, political ideology was sacralized into (unhealthy) theology.

Application: The result is what may be termed authoritarian evangelicalism - a trans-denominational movement that fuses grievance, nationalism, and politics with the language of divine authority. Where universities prize pluralism as a civic necessity, these churches re-frame pluralism as compromise, weakness, or even apostasy. Congregants are taught not to engage across difference but to resist it as faithfulness - often to their own detriment as well as their civic community around them.

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4. Theological Heresy: Collapse of Gospel into Ideology

Theologically, this represents a profound heresy of collapse. The radical openness of the gospel - its call to mercy, love, and reconciliation - is reduced to a narrow demand for conformity and control. Instead of shaping political life through compassion, these churches may sacralize preferred political ideologies as  active, possibly destructive, internal and external forces.

The “one true way” of the divine ceases to be Christ’s way of love and becomes the way of nationalism or authoritarian populism. In this collapse, the church ceases to be the Body of Christ and becomes an ideological machine. What should have been faith renewed for the world is instead faith distorted into a weapon of power.

Case illustration: In sermons recorded across evangelical denominations, pastors have equated voting for a particular candidate with fidelity to Christ. To dissent politically is to dissent spiritually. This inversion replaces the gospel of grace with the gospel of grievance, enshrining division as a sacred duty.

Application: For pastors, theologians, and lay leaders, the task is to name this collapse directly. Sermons, curricula, and small group studies should emphasize the difference between gospel-centered faith and ideology-driven religion. Teaching practices can highlight the radical inclusivity of Christ, contrasting it with the narrowness of nationalism. Churches can create liturgies, testimonies, and communal acts of service that embody hospitality, showing that faith flourishes not through conformity but through compassion.

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5. Constitutional Betrayal: From Democracy to Dominance

The constitutional danger mirrors the theological one. Where universities cultivate pluralism as essential to democracy, authoritarian evangelicalism casts pluralism as weakness. Civic space is reimagined not as a forum of equals but as a battlefield for dominance.

This distortion undermines the very framework that makes religious freedom possible. By collapsing faith into ideology - such as the removal of "church and state" boundaries - politicized churches betray the Constitution’s founding vision of a pluralist republic devoted to equality and justice, and as equally devoted to not giving preference to any one voice, religious or otherwise. A true democracy equally weights all voices in theory. In practice, the founding fathers, having suffered exclusion by dominating religious unions in their former home (Europe), sought separation of state oracles from dominating religious bodies and institutions. They did not wish to reduce democracy to theocracy, nor citizenship to conformity to legislated authoritarian rules of personalized or religious discrimination and bias.

Case illustration: Efforts to enshrine explicit Christian identity into public schools or government policies illustrate this un-democratic urge to revert back to the days where the institutionalized church dominated state politics. When pluralism is dismissed, protections for religious minorities and secular citizens alike are weakened. Ironically, the very Constitution that shields churches from state interference is undermined by the churches themselves when they seek dominance rather than dialogue.

Application: For civic leaders, educators, and congregants, vigilance is required where faith begins to mask authoritarian impulses. This means insisting that civic spaces remain accessible to all, not just the religious majority. This would critically include educational, judicial, legal, and religious spaces as example. Moreover, practical measures might include supporting inter-faith councils, participating in community forums, and defending policies that protect pluralism. By reminding churches that the Constitution safeguards their freedom precisely by protecting the freedom of others, communities can reorient their polarized conversations from dominance to dialogue.

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6. Reversing the Reversal

The downward trajectory from universities dedicated to openness to church-led polarization, either rightly or wrongly perceived, illustrates how rapidly democratic pluralism can be undone in a blended nation whose history has always been one of many voices. It also can reveal the possibility of healthful reversal should dialogue engage between universities and communities. Where this has been done successfully we see the correspondent rise of medical health, inclusion, forward economic diversity, emerging industry, and attractive community projects. If pluralism is to survive, it must flow upwards, downwards, and sideways at all times. These are the marks of an inclusive democracy unled by nationalized or religious doctrinaires.

• Universities must continue fostering breadth but also communicate its civic urgency in accessible ways. Their message cannot remain locked in academic language; it must filter back into the communities from which their students come.

• Communities must cultivate curiosity and resist the temptation to collapse global concerns into parochial suspicion. They can become bridges of understanding rather than barriers to it.

• Churches must rediscover the gospel’s radical hospitality. To disentangle faith from partisan captivity is to reclaim Christianity’s central call: to love one’s neighbor, not to conquer them.

Case illustration: Initiatives where churches partner with local universities - on refugee resettlement, climate resilience, or civic educational opportunities - show how pluralism can be reactivated. In such collaborations, institutions of breadth and institutions of belonging work together, rather than at odds, to build democratic strength.

Application: For all three levels - universities, communities, and churches - the call is to rebuild channels of dialogue. Universities can establish ongoing partnerships with local churches and civic organizations, providing resources in accessible language. Communities can organize forums where academic voices and everyday concerns meet in honest exchange. Churches can reclaim practices of radical hospitality by welcoming diverse voices into study, worship, and service. In this way, each institution plays a role in reweaving pluralism back into the civic fabric.

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Conclusion

The contest is not merely between ideas but between structures of influence. Traditionally, universities have functioned as guardians of breadth, communities as mediators of identity, and churches, too often, as fortresses of closure. When closure triumphs, both gospel and Constitution are diminished. But when breadth reclaims its place, democracy and discipleship can once again meet in the shared work of love, justice, and the common good. The future of both faith and democracy depends on which structure, or which attitude, prevails.

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Suggested Bibliography

• Philip S. Gorski & Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

• Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God.

• Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth.

• John B. Cobb Jr., Process Theology as Political Theology.

Education in Process

Education in Process

A Process Vision Beyond

the Christian/Secular Divide

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

There is nothing secular within creation; all things

spring from the one God, whether named or not.

- re slater

When Christians speak of 'the secular,' we must always ask:

'Is this truth, or tradition, defending itself against grace?'

- re slater

One turns to earth for wisdom hard-won,

another to grace from the Maker begun.

One reads the lessons of books and years,

another the divine weave of hope and fears.

One trusts the compass of reason’s light,

the other faith’s mystery beyond all sight.

Yet both agree whether earth or sky,

all things studied move towards majesty.

- re slater

Learning is sacramental,

a participation in the divine poetry of the world.

A Process Education teaches that

God is still creating, still disclosing, still inviting.

- re slater

Introduction

Education is one of humanity’s oldest and most profound endeavors. It is the way cultures transmit wisdom, refine knowledge, cultivate virtues, and prepare future generations to live meaningfully in the world. Yet in contemporary Christian contexts, “education” often appears as a contested word. Some schools and churches speak of “Christian education” as distinct from “secular education,” defining themselves against a presumed cultural threat. The result is a narrowing of horizons: general education is roughly rebranded as “non-Christian” and  is implicitly deemed deficient and inferior, while “Christian education” claims privileged access to truth while claiming superiority of educational product.

This essay argues against that dichotomy. Whether Christian or non-Christian, education is education - regardless of source. That it is a shared human good which can be pursued in many forms, each valuable and worthy in its own right. Additionally, from a process perspective, education is not regarded as a static transfer of facts but a dynamic, relational, an unfolding series of events moving towards personal, if not communal, growth. In this preferred vision of education, Christian education does not replace or negate general education; rather, it offers its own distinctive contributions to public education's own distinctives.

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1. Education as a Shared Human Good

Education is the cultivation of human capacities. It equips people with skills in reasoning, interpretation, and creativity. It usually shapes ethical awareness, empathy, and community belonging. All of these characteristics are not uniquely Christian goods but universal motifs arising wherever humans teach and learn from one another.

Whether one is a student of mathematics in Beijing, attending a philosophy seminar in Paris, working in a biology lab in Nairobi, or redacting a literature class in São Paulo - all of these  human endeavors are participating in the same broad human project of education. To call one “secular” and another “Christian” is to do a deep disservice to the institutions committed to educating a community's young people. Broadly, education should never be distinguished between secular or religious for each approach should be working through similar discoveries. Rather, it is the interpretation of those discoveries which might divide in approach.

The derivation of the word "secular" might be instructive herein. It comes from the Latin saeculum (“of this age”), so that the original term describes the temporal world of present knowledge and understanding in deep contrast to eternality. The term was not used in opposition to God but was simply referencing any sphere of ordinary life that is being studied. It was only later, as used by religious institutions in justifying their identity and commitments; sic, the word secular was coined as a pejorative critiquing of non-religious educational bodies. In this sense, to dismiss general education as “secular” in the sense of anti-God is to misunderstand the word and to diminish the dignity of shared human inquiry across all educational enterprises.

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2. The False Binary of Christian versus Secular

The language of division presently shapes how Christian education defends its traditions, attitudes, and cultural capital. By casting “the secular” as its opposite, Christian learning defines itself more by contrast than by substance. This framing reduces education to a contest of opinionated boundaries rather than an exploration of truth. What might otherwise be a shared pursuit between religious and public institutions becomes a battlefield of competing ideologies, where loyalty is measured not by what is learned but by what is, or is not, emphasized—faith versus neutrality, doctrine versus inquiry.

Thus, when Christian education defines itself in opposition to “the secular,” several dangers can arise:

• Intellectual insularity: shielding students from voices outside the tradition, cutting them off from the richness and expansiveness of human discovery. Example, denial of evolution and promotion of Adam-and-Eve narrative.

• Cultural suspicion: treating mainstream knowledge as inherently hostile, rather than as a field of dialogue that can enlarge enculturated perspective.

• Weak scholarship: confusing apologetics with education, narrowing inquiry to what serves pre-defined doctrinal ends.

This binary, ironically, contradicts Christianity’s own history. Augustine engaged Plato, Aquinas drew on Aristotle, and the French Jesuit priest cum paleontologist cum philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, integrated evolutionary science with theology. Likewise, Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician turned philosopher, built a metaphysical vision in dialogue with both science and religion. Across the centuries, the Christian intellectual tradition has rarely feared the wider currents of thought; instead, it has repeatedly drawn upon them to articulate its deepest convictions.

To wall off Christian learning from so-called “secular” wisdom, then, is to betray this deeper lineage of integration. A process perspective continues the same spirit, recognizing that truth emerges in the relational interplay of reason, experience, and faith. By engaging rather than excluding the world’s wisdom, Christian education aligns with its own best history: not defensive, but dynamic; not insular, but open to the creative advance of knowledge in all its forms.

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3. Historical Depth: Christianity’s Long Engagement with Knowledge

Christianity has never pursued truth in isolation. From its earliest centuries, it stood at the crossroads of cultures, philosophies, and sciences, engaging rather than ignoring the intellectual treasures of its age. Far from rejecting “worldly” learning, the church often served as a bridge between inherited wisdom and emerging revelation, preserving ancient texts while reframing them in theological light. This long history reveals that Christian thought has always been porous, adaptive, and dialogical - shaped as much by conversation with the world as by its internal convictions.

• Early Christianity: The church fathers relied heavily on Greek philosophy to articulate doctrines of God, creation, and the soul. Origen, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa were shaped by Platonic categories, and their theological creativity depended on this dialogue.

• The Middle Ages: In monasteries and cathedral schools, Christian scholars preserved not only Scripture but also the writings of Cicero, Aristotle, and Galen. Islamic scholars like Averroes and Avicenna transmitted Aristotelian thought to the West, where it was integrated by Thomas Aquinas into a grand synthesis of faith and reason.

• The Renaissance and Enlightenment: Far from retreating, Christian scholars engaged the rebirth of classical learning, the rise of modern science, and the new humanism. Copernicus and Kepler worked within a theological worldview while reshaping astronomy; Locke and Milton drew on Protestant ideas of liberty while contributing to modern political thought.

• The Modern and Postmodern Age: Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician turned philosopher, articulated a process vision that reconnected theology and philosophy with the emerging sciences of relativity and quantum physics. Later process scholars have continued this trajectory, drawing on cosmology, ecology, and postmodern critique to sustain a dialogue between faith and the cutting edges of human inquiry.

This legacy makes clear that Christian engagement with knowledge has never been a matter of purity versus compromise but of integration of past knowledge with renewal of present directions. Each era borrowed, translated, and transformed what it received, weaving external insights into its own theological fabric. For religious bodies to remember this historical perspective can help resist the temptation of building defensive binaries. The church has always been strongest when it was in conversation with the intellectual life of its time, drawing wisdom from the world not as a threat to faith but as a catalyst for deeper understanding.

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4. Education and the Public Good

Education is never a private endeavor alone. While it shapes individuals, its fruits spill outward into the life of society - building citizens, sustaining institutions, and guiding cultures toward justice or away from it. To speak of education without reference to the public good is to miss its civic dimension. For instance, every classroom, lecture hall, and library participates in the ongoing project of integrating democracy into nationalized culture, nurturing the habits of dialogue, responsibility, and imagination on which a shared future engaged with many voices critically depends. Education then, is not only for personal formation but also for the public good. It fosters informed citizens, strengthens democracy, and equips societies to face shared challenges. To divide education into Christian and secular camps is to risk eroding this common fabric.

Moreover, from a process perspective, knowledge is relational and cumulative. What one community discovers can benefit all; what one society neglects can impoverish all. A healthy pluralist society thrives when multiple voices - religious, philosophical, scientific, artistic - must be allowed to converse and challenge one another. If Christian education retreats into enclaves suspicious of “the secular,” it risks not only its own vitality but also its contribution to the broader civic good. Education, therefore, is best seen as a communal weaving: threads of diverse traditions, insights, and experiences brought together into a tapestry of shared wisdom.

Seen in this light, dividing education into “Christian” and “secular” not only impoverishes faith but also weakens society. When schools withdraw into suspicion of one another, the common fabric frays, and shared wisdom is lost. A process perspective reminds us that knowledge is relational and cumulative, that discoveries belong not to one community but to the whole human family. Education for the public good is thus not an optional extra - it is the very measure of whether learning fulfills its deepest purpose: to contribute to the flourishing of all.

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5. Education in a Process Perspective

If reality itself is process - dynamic, relational, and unfolding - then education must ever be understood in processual terms. Knowledge and learning are never finished products delivered to passive minds but is instruction across dimensions of reality in various process stages of becoming either more-or-less than it is in response to the ecosystems being studied.

Education is also a processual activity in which learners and teachers co-create "meaningful meaning" together. Every act of learning is more than the transfer of information; it is a transformation that reshapes identity, possibility, and community. To approach education in this way is to see it not as a static achievement but as an ever-deepening participation in the creative advance of life.

Process philosophy reframes education not as the possession of fixed truths but as an unfolding journey of becoming. Several key insights follow:

• Relationality: Knowledge is co-created in interaction between teacher and student, learner and text, individual and community.

• Eventfulness: Learning is not simply the storage of information but the transformation of the learner through new experiences.

• Creativity: Each educational act introduces novelty, generating fresh possibilities for thought and action.

• Open-endedness: Because reality itself is never closed, never ended, but is always processual - education is likewise never finished, never close, but always provisional, always growing, ever flowing.

• God is never-ending, ever flowing. Education is infused with sacred depth. To learn is to participate in the creative advance of the universe - to weave one’s life into the ongoing story of the world. God is never-ending, ever flowing. The same must be said of religious education, even when faith communities present their doctrines as closed or final. When the church insists on fixity, it places itself at cross-purposes with reality and with God’s own Self. Neither reality nor God is static. Both are ever in process, moving forward from experience to experience, inviting us to grow with them.

A process perspective thus redefines education as sacred encounter: always leaning into moments of novelty breaking in, relationships deepening, and wisdom emerging through shared communal experience. No classroom is ever final, no curriculum ever complete, because reality itself is always becoming. To educate is to join this divine cosmic movement which would allow the nurturing of creativity, the cultivation of social responsibility, and the opening up of newer pathways of justice, equality, and possibility. In this light, education becomes not only preparation for life but for life itself that is integrally woven into the ongoing evolution of the world-soul.

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6. A Sacramental Theology of Truth

If Section 5 showed education as process, Section 6 presses further: education is not only processual but sacramental. If all creation is God’s self-expression, then every act of learning becomes a potential meeting place with the divine. Truth is not divided into sacred and secular domains but flows as one living stream through the whole fabric of reality.

To discover a mathematical theorem, to map a new ecosystem, or to compose a piece of music, is to glimpse an aspect of divine creativity. In this sense, education is sacramental: it mediates God’s presence through the world’s intelligibility. The search for truth, wherever it takes place, is an encounter with divine possibility. As Whitehead suggests,

God is the “poet of the world.” Every act of

discovery is a stanza in God's ongoing poem.

-re slater

Such a vision elevates education from a merely human endeavor to a deeply spiritual one. It challenges Christian educators to move beyond the old divide between “holy” and “worldly” knowledge, recognizing instead the sacred in all authentic learning. To teach and to learn is, in this light, to participate in God’s ongoing self-disclosure - a communion of minds and hearts with the Living Creativity at the heart of the universe.

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7. Christian Education Within This Frame

If education in general is already a sacred good, then Christian education should not be imagined as a competing system but as a distinctive contribution within the larger whole. Its task is not to divide the field of knowledge into “ours” and “theirs,” but to bring the resources of faith - its moral vision, spiritual practices, and narrative depth - into dialogue with all that humanity discovers. This also means that the church must listen to society and not blindly believe that it's practices of yesteryear should be unquestioned or preferred. As is often the case with traditional practices, they have been found to be more harmful than good.

• A moral horizon that frames knowledge within questions of justice, love, and human flourishing.

• Spiritual practices that cultivate attentiveness, gratitude, and responsibility toward God and neighbor.

• Narrative depth that situates learning within the broader story of creation, redemption, and hope.

These mediating gifts are real, but they do not exhaust what education is. Nor should they be used to dismiss the broader field of human learning. At its best, Christian education participates in the shared work of discovery, while offering its own insights as dialogue within the larger, general conversation of the world - a world that often sees more clearly than religiously bound faith communities, long practiced in unseeing, judgment, and indifference.

To be truly Christian, then, is not to shrink from the world but to embrace its insights more deeply, confident that all “true-truth” is God’s truth. That ancient beliefs and practices must be opened up from their closed-and-fixed positional convictions. This may be what the Apostle Paul hinted at when speaking of mirrors and meat: that cultural practices are not inherently right or good but may prove unjust and harmful, demanding discernment, humility, and transformation.

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✨The Mirror → 1 Corinthians 13:12

“For now we see through a glass, darkly/dimly; but then face to face:

now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Paul is pointing to the partial, provisional nature of human knowledge, compared to the fuller vision of a loving God’s redeeming future.

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✨ The Meat → 1 Corinthians 8 (and also Romans 14)

1 Corinthians 8:1–13: Paul addresses eating food sacrificed to idols. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up; even if eating is not inherently sinful, it can wound the conscience of others.

Romans 14:13–23: Paul expands on this, saying,

“It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do

anything that causes your brother to stumble.”

Here Paul is showing that cultural/religious practices aren’t inherently good or bad but must be discerned in light of love, justice, and the common good.

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8. Practical Implications: What Process Education Looks Like

The vision remains incomplete unless we imagine what it might look like in practice. How would Christian education change if it embraced process thought and the sacramental depth of truth?

• Science: Teaching evolution as a dimension of God’s ongoing creativity, rather than as a rival to faith. This would hold with all the sciences as they morph and transform, adjust and adapt. Processual theology does likewise - not holding God's image in impassible, transcendent closures but seeing God as present, infilling, redeeming.

• Literature: Reading works from diverse cultures as encounters with the many ways humans wrestle with meaning, suffering, and hope.

• Dialogue: Welcoming interfaith and non-religious voices into classrooms, modeling respect and curiosity rather than fear.

• Ethics and Civic Life: Forming students not just for private piety but for public responsibility, encouraging them to serve the common good.

Such practices reveal that Christian education does not diminish the scope of learning but expands it. It becomes truly Christian not by standing apart from the world but by engaging it with openness, creativity, and reverence. In this way, education fulfills its dual calling: to form persons of depth and to nurture communities of justice, compassion, and shared flourishing.

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Conclusion

Education in process reveals itself not as a battleground between “Christian” and “secular” but as a shared pilgrimage toward truth. To pointedly cling to oppositional binaries is to impoverish both faith and learning. But when embracing relationality, openness, and creativity is to more fully align education with the very movement of reality with God’s own divine Life.

Christian theology can enrich this journey by not walling itself off from general society but by bringing its moral horizon, spiritual practices, and narrative depth into conversation with the discoveries of science, art, and culture. At its best, Christian education is not a fortress but a table - where insights are exchanged, tested, and deepened in community.

The church must therefore loosen its grip on fixed certainties and rediscover the provisional, ever-unfolding nature of truth. As Paul once said, “we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12), and what we count as “clean” or “unclean” in cultural practice may not align with God’s justice or love (1 Cor. 8; Rom. 14). These reminders invite humility to remember and to practice that: 

"Knowledge is always partial, and faith must always be discerning."

To embrace education as process is to confess that God is still creating, still disclosing, still inviting. Learning is sacramental, a participation in the divine poetry of the world. To teach and to learn in this light is not simply to prepare for life but to share in the very life of God - ever becoming, ever flowing, ever new.