Custom seed person
Stage:: seed 🌱 Type:: People Topics:: metamodernism philosophy spirituality
About
Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer and thinker whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He earned his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and his MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. He lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic retreat center Sky Meadow.
Dempsey’s central contribution is framing metamodernism through the lens of emergentism — the view that meaning is neither imposed on a dead universe (modernism) nor deconstructed into absence (postmodernism), but emerges through increasing complexity and integration. He advocates for re-enchantment without regression: taking spiritual and philosophical traditions seriously using the vocabulary of complexity science.
Notable Works
- Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics — foundational text on metamodern theory
- Numerous essays and lectures on emergentism, the meaning crisis, and post-secular spirituality
- Contributor to the broader metamodernism discourse alongside Layman Pascal, Bruce Alderman, and others