Brendan Graham Dempsey: How Meaning and the Sacred Evolve Over Time

What if meaning is not something we find once, but something we learn to make more deeply over time?

In this Lectern conversation, Ethan Hsieh welcomes Brendan Graham Dempsey to introduce his upcoming course, Matters Over Time: How the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society. Brendan is Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory and director at Sky Meadow Institute, where his work focuses on meaning-making, significance, the sacred, complexity, and systems-based thinking.

The conversation begins with Brendan's own encounter with a meaning crisis and the question that followed from it: is there an order to the way our frames of meaning are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed? From there, Ethan and Brendan explore why meaning is not merely private preference, why growth often requires discomfort, and why expanding our meaning-making does not have to erase what already matters to us.

They then move from individual psychology into culture, history, and the sacred. Brendan argues that our forms of meaning-making develop across personal lives and across human history, and that the sacred itself can be understood as evolving, complexifying, and widening our participation in reality. The course is presented not only as an intellectual framework, but as a contemplative invitation to understand ourselves as part of a larger learning process.

Join Brendan Graham Dempsey for Matters Over TimeHow the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society. Course page

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