Abstract

This article explores the search for, and status of, meaning in the twenty-first century, arguing for agnostic openness of belief in the face of increasingly retrenched positions of scientific rationalism and religious fundamentalism. It explores a crucial transition in the Western conception of the construction of meaning, from revealed truth to relational difference, evidenced in competing ontological models at work at the opening of the Enlightenment, in the most influential of popular Christian writers, John Bunyan, and considers what this reveals about meaning, knowledge, and faith today. It argues for agnosticism, understood as strong uncertainty, as a position of openness to be sustained against dominant ontological and epsitemological frameworks.