Trying Out New Things
On Being Nourished by Adventure
Tradition and Novelty
Many people think that sticking with inherited traditions and repeating the beliefs of the past is the surest way of being faithful to God. Sometimes it is. Traditions carry hard-won wisdom, and faithfulness often requires patience, continuity, and care for what has been received. Faithfulness lies in being humble to the wisdom of our ancestors. We need not invent the faith we live by.
But our ancestors themselves were also adventurous. What we consider 'tradition' was, for them, novelty. They risked thinking new thoughts, which became, for us, tradition. We rightly learn from this side of their lives, too. Sometimes trying out new things—including new ways of thinking, imagining, and interpreting our lives together—is itself a way of being faithful to God. If God is love, and if love is living, relational, and creative rather than static, then faithfulness cannot always mean repetition. It can also mean attentiveness to how love is seeking expression under new conditions.
In those moments, faith is not preserved by clinging to the past, but by trusting that God’s love is still at work, still calling us forward, and still capable of surprising us with possibilities we have not yet learned how to name.
But our ancestors themselves were also adventurous. What we consider 'tradition' was, for them, novelty. They risked thinking new thoughts, which became, for us, tradition. We rightly learn from this side of their lives, too. Sometimes trying out new things—including new ways of thinking, imagining, and interpreting our lives together—is itself a way of being faithful to God. If God is love, and if love is living, relational, and creative rather than static, then faithfulness cannot always mean repetition. It can also mean attentiveness to how love is seeking expression under new conditions.
In those moments, faith is not preserved by clinging to the past, but by trusting that God’s love is still at work, still calling us forward, and still capable of surprising us with possibilities we have not yet learned how to name.
Trying out New Things
A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas,
- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas,
When Whitehead writes that a people can be “nerved by the vigour to adventure,” he is naming an affective condition rather than an act of will or a moral command.
To be nerved is to find oneself inwardly braced—animated and steadied by a felt possibility that has not yet been realized. This energy does not arise from nostalgia for the past or from calculating what is safe, but from a lived contrast between what has been inherited and what might yet emerge. Adventure, in this sense, is receptive rather than assertive: it is the courage to respond to a lure whose outcome is promising but not clearly defined.
The vigour to adventure functions as a lure for feeling—an invitation that moves us before we decide and strengthens us before we act. We do not nerve ourselves into adventure by sheer resolve. We are nerved by the sense, bodily as well as intellectual, that something meaningful might happen if we step beyond established securities. This happens, among other ways, when we meet and get to know people who are different from us. When this felt openness to the future disappears, civilization does not simply make poor choices; it begins to decay. The future is reduced to the management of the past, and vitality drains away.
For Whitehead, adventure is not a luxury but a condition of life. A society may preserve its institutions, habits, and even its moral language, and yet be in decline if it no longer feels the pull of unrealized possibilities. To be nerved is to sense that the world is still unfinished, that the present carries more than repetition. Without this openness, safety becomes suffocating and continuity hardens into inertia.
Whitehead is not celebrating novelty for its own sake. He is pointing to a necessary tension between memory and hope, inheritance and imagination. Adventure keeps this tension alive, not through coercion or command, but through the inward strengthening that comes from hope—never certainty—that something genuinely new may yet be born beyond the safeties of the past.
In our own time, such adventure calls us both personally and politically. On a personal level, it may take the form of forgiving where resentment has grown familiar, changing habits or vocations that no longer foster growth, remaining open to love after loss, or cultivating practices—artistic, spiritual, communal—that invite us beyond the comfort of repetition. In each case, the risk is not novelty-seeking but the willingness to be inwardly changed by responding to possibilities whose outcomes cannot be fully known in advance.
Politically, the adventure is of a similar kind, though writ large. It involves moving beyond the safeties of fixed identities--liberal or conservative, left or right—toward forms of social life that have not yet found a settled name, but which seek to integrate the best insights of each. This is not a call to bland centrism or to the erasure of difference, but a refusal of ideological purity as a substitute for imagination. It requires being nerved by the felt possibility that new forms of solidarity, responsibility, and care might yet be realized.
Trying Out New Things
One response to this lure is to try out new things. By this, I do not mean only new observable activities, but also new ways of thinking—new concepts, narratives, and habits of interpretation through which we understand ourselves and our shared life. Such cognitive and imaginative experiments are themselves forms of adventure. They loosen the grip of inherited assumptions and open space for meanings that have not yet been fully articulated. Often, it is these inner experiments that make outward change possible at all.
Trying out new things is easily misunderstood in a culture that equates novelty with consumption or disruption. In the sense at issue here, it is neither experimentation for its own sake nor a rejection of the past. It is a disciplined openness to possibility—a willingness to test whether new patterns of thought, relationship, or practice might carry more life than those that have grown rigid through overuse.
Seen this way, trying out new things is not a betrayal of tradition but one of its conditions of renewal. Traditions that endure do so because they were, and remain, willing to risk reinterpretation in response to new circumstances. Fidelity to the past does not mean repetition; it means honoring the living aims embodied in inherited forms by carrying them forward into an unfinished future. Where such courage is present, societies may again find themselves nerved by the vigour to adventure—and thus capable of resisting decay.
Trying Out New Things as Faithfulness to God as Love
From Whitehead's perspective, trying out new things can be understood as a way of being faithful to God precisely because God is Love. In process thought, divine love is not possessive or controlling; it is relational, creative, and invitational. God does not impose outcomes but offers possibilities—lures toward richer forms of relationship, greater intensity of value, and deeper forms of mutual flourishing. To respond to these lures is to participate in love’s ongoing work in the world.
Seen this way, faithfulness is not primarily a matter of protecting what already exists, but of remaining responsive to how love seeks expression under new conditions. Love, after all, cannot be reduced to repetition. It must be re-enacted, re-imagined, and re-lived in concrete situations that differ from those of the past. Trying out new ways of thinking, relating, and organizing life together is one way of asking whether love might take form differently now than it did before.
This does not mean that everything new is loving, nor that change itself is a moral good. Love requires discernment. But discernment cannot occur without experiment. Possibilities must be tested in lived experience to see whether they deepen care, widen sympathy, and sustain community. To refuse all experimentation in the name of faith can quietly betray a lack of trust in love’s creativity—as if divine love had already said everything it has to say.
In this sense, trying out new things is not a departure from faith in God as Love, but one of its practices. It is a way of trusting that love is still active, still calling, still capable of finding new paths beyond the safeties of the past. To be nerved by the vigour to adventure, then, is to be strengthened by love itself—by confidence that responding to love’s lure, even without guarantees, is how faith remains alive in an unfinished world.
- Jay McDaniel with help from OpenAI
To be nerved is to find oneself inwardly braced—animated and steadied by a felt possibility that has not yet been realized. This energy does not arise from nostalgia for the past or from calculating what is safe, but from a lived contrast between what has been inherited and what might yet emerge. Adventure, in this sense, is receptive rather than assertive: it is the courage to respond to a lure whose outcome is promising but not clearly defined.
The vigour to adventure functions as a lure for feeling—an invitation that moves us before we decide and strengthens us before we act. We do not nerve ourselves into adventure by sheer resolve. We are nerved by the sense, bodily as well as intellectual, that something meaningful might happen if we step beyond established securities. This happens, among other ways, when we meet and get to know people who are different from us. When this felt openness to the future disappears, civilization does not simply make poor choices; it begins to decay. The future is reduced to the management of the past, and vitality drains away.
For Whitehead, adventure is not a luxury but a condition of life. A society may preserve its institutions, habits, and even its moral language, and yet be in decline if it no longer feels the pull of unrealized possibilities. To be nerved is to sense that the world is still unfinished, that the present carries more than repetition. Without this openness, safety becomes suffocating and continuity hardens into inertia.
Whitehead is not celebrating novelty for its own sake. He is pointing to a necessary tension between memory and hope, inheritance and imagination. Adventure keeps this tension alive, not through coercion or command, but through the inward strengthening that comes from hope—never certainty—that something genuinely new may yet be born beyond the safeties of the past.
In our own time, such adventure calls us both personally and politically. On a personal level, it may take the form of forgiving where resentment has grown familiar, changing habits or vocations that no longer foster growth, remaining open to love after loss, or cultivating practices—artistic, spiritual, communal—that invite us beyond the comfort of repetition. In each case, the risk is not novelty-seeking but the willingness to be inwardly changed by responding to possibilities whose outcomes cannot be fully known in advance.
Politically, the adventure is of a similar kind, though writ large. It involves moving beyond the safeties of fixed identities--liberal or conservative, left or right—toward forms of social life that have not yet found a settled name, but which seek to integrate the best insights of each. This is not a call to bland centrism or to the erasure of difference, but a refusal of ideological purity as a substitute for imagination. It requires being nerved by the felt possibility that new forms of solidarity, responsibility, and care might yet be realized.
Trying Out New Things
One response to this lure is to try out new things. By this, I do not mean only new observable activities, but also new ways of thinking—new concepts, narratives, and habits of interpretation through which we understand ourselves and our shared life. Such cognitive and imaginative experiments are themselves forms of adventure. They loosen the grip of inherited assumptions and open space for meanings that have not yet been fully articulated. Often, it is these inner experiments that make outward change possible at all.
Trying out new things is easily misunderstood in a culture that equates novelty with consumption or disruption. In the sense at issue here, it is neither experimentation for its own sake nor a rejection of the past. It is a disciplined openness to possibility—a willingness to test whether new patterns of thought, relationship, or practice might carry more life than those that have grown rigid through overuse.
Seen this way, trying out new things is not a betrayal of tradition but one of its conditions of renewal. Traditions that endure do so because they were, and remain, willing to risk reinterpretation in response to new circumstances. Fidelity to the past does not mean repetition; it means honoring the living aims embodied in inherited forms by carrying them forward into an unfinished future. Where such courage is present, societies may again find themselves nerved by the vigour to adventure—and thus capable of resisting decay.
Trying Out New Things as Faithfulness to God as Love
From Whitehead's perspective, trying out new things can be understood as a way of being faithful to God precisely because God is Love. In process thought, divine love is not possessive or controlling; it is relational, creative, and invitational. God does not impose outcomes but offers possibilities—lures toward richer forms of relationship, greater intensity of value, and deeper forms of mutual flourishing. To respond to these lures is to participate in love’s ongoing work in the world.
Seen this way, faithfulness is not primarily a matter of protecting what already exists, but of remaining responsive to how love seeks expression under new conditions. Love, after all, cannot be reduced to repetition. It must be re-enacted, re-imagined, and re-lived in concrete situations that differ from those of the past. Trying out new ways of thinking, relating, and organizing life together is one way of asking whether love might take form differently now than it did before.
This does not mean that everything new is loving, nor that change itself is a moral good. Love requires discernment. But discernment cannot occur without experiment. Possibilities must be tested in lived experience to see whether they deepen care, widen sympathy, and sustain community. To refuse all experimentation in the name of faith can quietly betray a lack of trust in love’s creativity—as if divine love had already said everything it has to say.
In this sense, trying out new things is not a departure from faith in God as Love, but one of its practices. It is a way of trusting that love is still active, still calling, still capable of finding new paths beyond the safeties of the past. To be nerved by the vigour to adventure, then, is to be strengthened by love itself—by confidence that responding to love’s lure, even without guarantees, is how faith remains alive in an unfinished world.
- Jay McDaniel with help from OpenAI