Brendan Graham Dempsey: How Meaning and the Sacred Evolve Over Time
•May 18, 2026
Why It Matters
Mapping how meaning forms and changes helps individuals, leaders and institutions respond to meaning crises, support mental resilience, and design social practices that preserve significance across time. This has direct implications for culture, wellbeing and organizational strategy.
Summary
Brendan Graham Dempsey outlines his new Lexton course Matters Over Time, which traces how meaning, significance and the sacred evolve across individual life courses and cultural history. Drawing on his own meaning crisis, complexity and developmental-systems thinking, and influences like John Vervaeke, he presents models for how people and societies construct, lose and rebuild what matters. The course foregrounds both theoretical frameworks (relevance realization, developmental trajectories) and practical implications for how meaning is experienced and sustained. Dempsey also notes that while some live contentedly without deep existential inquiry, understanding these processes can clarify why meaning shifts and how to navigate those shifts.
Original Description
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 Time: How the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society. Course page: https://lectern.johnvervaeke.com/courses/matters-over-time
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to The Lectern
00:30 Introducing Brendan Graham Dempsey and the course
01:30 Brendan's work on meaning, significance, and the sacred
02:00 A personal meaning crisis and the study of meaning-making
03:30 John's influence and the meaning crisis
04:00 Matters Over Time: course subtitle and frame
04:40 Why meaning-making is necessarily complex
06:00 What if life already feels simple and meaningful enough?
08:20 Seeing patterns in how people make meaning
09:30 Meaning-making as a meta-meaningful process
11:40 Does expanding meaning threaten what already matters?
12:30 Complexification as widening rather than negation
13:20 The ethical need to widen beyond the self
14:40 Widening and deepening interiority
16:30 Meaning-making is shareable and correctable
17:30 What if I have not found what is meaningful yet?
18:40 Growth, discomfort, and the learning process
21:10 Comfort, hollowness, and the "so what?" question
22:40 How do I know my life is meaningful?
23:00 James Fowler, interview data, and faith development theory
24:50 Different forms of meaning-making
27:20 Case studies and the first course session
28:40 Is meaning just my private construction?
29:20 Worldview bubbles, relativism, and value nihilism
34:10 Finding order in pluralistic chaos
36:40 Ethan on recovering from nihilism
38:10 The psychological and sociological dimensions of meaning
39:40 Understanding our epoch in relation to human history
40:50 Moving from individual meaning-making to cultural evolution
41:40 Similar patterns across personal life and human history
44:00 Meaning-making as a cosmic complexification process
46:20 Are we already connected to something larger?
48:10 Taking the framework on board as a lived worldview
50:20 Against the "cosmic fluke" story of human insignificance
52:40 Human consciousness and meaning-making in the cosmic story
54:00 Responsibility, wisdom, and the call to grow
57:40 Meaning-making and the sacred
58:40 Brendan's faith crisis and the question of the sacred
59:40 Meaning as knowledge that enhances viability
01:00:30 Awe, wonder, and the sacred as transformative encounter
01:02:10 Tradition, symbols, and cultural transmission
01:03:10 Prophets, sages, and updating the sacred
01:04:00 From tribal belonging to common humanity
01:05:40 How the sacred evolves and complexifies
01:06:10 God, cultural evolution, and changing images of the divine
01:07:40 The sacred as liberating and confronting
01:09:30 The course as deep contemplation
01:10:20 Seeing oneself within the process of meaning-making
01:12:30 Re-homing ourselves in relation to the sacred
01:14:40 Participating in a new movement of the sacred
01:17:00 Course page invitation
01:18:10 Brendan's closing note on humility and dialogos
01:20:20 Final thanks
Follow John Vervaeke:
Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/johnvervaeke
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