Listening to a lecture I heard Peter Leithart and Ralph Smith accused of being “skeptical” about ontology and insisting we can only know the relational.

But a relational ontology is just that: an ontology.

Relationship is not opposed to ontology, being, or even substance. The point is that the relational is the substance, rather than an imagined impersonal thing. There is no “stuff” more basic than persons.