Brendan Graham Dempsey: Matters Over Time

What if the question is not simply whether life has meaning, but how our capacity for meaning develops?

In this Lectern conversation, Ethan Hsieh speaks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his upcoming course, Matters Over Time: How the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society. Brendan introduces the course through his own experience of a meaning crisis, which led him to ask how meaning-making frames are constructed, lost, reconstructed, and developed.

The conversation begins at the personal level. Brendan explains why studying meaning-making can help us understand our own minds, other people's worlds, and the recurring patterns by which human beings organize significance. Ethan presses him from two sides: the person who feels life is already meaningful enough, and the person who has searched for meaning for years without finding it. Brendan's answer is careful: the course is not meant to force existential confrontation, but to invite a wider and deeper participation in reality.

From there, the discussion turns toward relativism, nihilism, and pluralism. Brendan argues that once an inherited worldview breaks open, people often either double down on a single frame or collapse into the idea that all meaning is merely private. His work tries to find an order beyond that pluralistic chaos by looking at developmental patterns in meaning-making across individual lives, cultures, and history.

The final movement of the conversation brings the course into its largest register: the sacred. Brendan frames meaning as a kind of knowledge that links us to reality in a viability-enhancing way, and he interprets the sacred as that which deepens flourishing, widens participation, and draws us into awe, wonder, and transformation. The course becomes not only a theory of meaning, but an invitation to see ourselves as participants in a much larger learning process.

Key Insights Meaning-making can be studied as a developmental process rather than treated as a private feeling or arbitrary construction. Brendan's work is shaped by his own meaning crisis and by John Vervaeke's account of the cultural meaning crisis. Complexification does not mean abandoning what already matters; it means situating it within a wider and deeper horizon. Ethical growth requires widening meaning beyond the self and becoming more responsive to other people, cultures, and perspectives. Faith Development Theory and interview-based research offer ways to study how people answer questions about purpose and significance. Relativism can be an advance beyond rigid absolutism, but it can also become chaotic and disorienting. The course links individual development to cultural evolution and the history of human meaning-making. Brendan resists both triumphalist progress stories and simple decline stories. The sacred is presented as evolving through human history as our relationship to ultimate concern becomes more complex. The course is meant to be dialogical and exploratory, not a closed system. Timestamps 00:00 Welcome and introduction

01:30 Brendan's background and research focus

02:00 Personal meaning crisis and meaning-making

03:30 John Vervaeke's influence

04:00 Course frame: sacred and significant in self and society

06:00 Why study meaning if life already feels fine?

08:20 Patterns and structures in meaning-making