Reconstructing Meaning in a Postmodern Age: Relational Ontology, Sacred Secularity, and Postmodern Renewal

This article seeks to describe a postmodern ontology characterized by the nihilism of meaning, its pre-modern recovery of communal participation and its focus on otherness to describe its secular renewal through a development of relational ontology articulated through the thought of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Charles Taylor, and Raimon Panikkar. By developing Nancy’s innovation of mitsein (being-with) from Heidegger’s ontological question and development of Dasein, and subsequently through Charles Taylor’s account of a moral ontology, I argue that relational ontology is fundamentally orientated to everydayness, from which I offer Raimon Panikkar’s religious renewal of secular experience. Offering a constructive critique by focusing on the thought of Raimon Panikkar, this article advocates for a cosmotheandric renewal of secular experience through Panikkar’s idea of sacred secularity and seeks to explore Panikkarean pathways in which the postmodern self may talk of a ‘secular faith’.