Metamodern Spirituality & Process Theology
by Brendan Graham Dempsey
September 23, 2022
On this episode of Conversations in Process, Jay McDaniel and Jared Morningstar are joined by Brendan Graham Dempsey to discuss metamodern spirituality and possible connections with process theology. Brendan is a podcaster, author, community-builder, philosopher, and poet whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He has a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and an MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. Brendan lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic Sky Meadow retreat center and hosts metamodern gatherings.
In this conversation, Jay, Brendan, and Jared discuss metamodernism and its relationship to various other intellectual/philosophical modes—such as modernism and postmodernism—and also consider its relationship with process thinking and contemporary religiosity.
The discussion begins with Brendan’s own journey with metamodernism and how this was intricately intertwined with his own spiritual path of deconstructing and eventually reconstructing a religious worldview. Based on his work in his pseudonymously authored book BUILDING THE CATHEDRAL: ANSWERING THE MEANING CRISIS THROUGH PERSONAL MYTH, Brendan explains the centrality of narrativizing and personal myth-making in a metamodern spiritual project.
Jay builds on these ideas, introducing process ideas such as Whitehead’s “consequent nature of God,” showing how not only our own religious sensibilities are in process, but actually so is the Divine itself. However, there is still the question of communal and collective spirituality and myth-making, and Jay wonders if the collectivity involved here may even be beyond our merely human communities.
The conversation closes with a discussion of the relationship between metamodernism and the established religious traditions. Jay asks, “can a Methodist be metamodern?” and Brendan beautifully responds in the affirmative, stating that these traditions have the potential to be expressed and understood in a variety of different moods, from pre-modern to metamodern and everything in between. The goal of a metamodern standpoint, however, is to accept all of these different moods for what they are and the value they bring, and weave a coherent whole of this diversity, without losing the unique individuality of the various standpoints.
LINKS:
- Brendan’s website: https://brendangrahamdempsey.com/
- Brendan’s book Building the Cathedral: Answering the Meaning Crisis through Personal Myth: https://bookshop.org/a/18093/97987288...
- A conversation with Brendan, Layman Pascal, and John Vervaeke: “The Artful Scaling of the Religion that is not a Religion”: https://youtu.be/rAnLbaFHYWQ
- Matt Segall on Brendan’s Metamodern Spirituality podcast: “Process Philosophy and the Metamodern Metanarrative”: https://youtu.be/j-EgCakXA9Y
- Sky Meadow Retreat: https://skymeadowretreat.com
- The Cobb Institute: https://cobb.institute
- Jay McDaniel's "Open Horizons": https://www.openhorizons.org
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Metamodern Spirituality
Process Philosophy and the Metamodern Metanarrative
w/ Matt Segall & Brendan Graham Dempsey
February 22, 2022
Topic
Matt Segall joins Brendan to talk about the relationship of process philosophy and the thinking of A. N. Whitehead to the formulation of an emerging metanarrative in metamodernity. In the context of our 13.7 billion years of emergent complexification, how does the story of consciousness evolution relate to issues such as dualism and the hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism, divine creativity, and mystical union?Matt Segall's faculty bioMatthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.
