Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer and poet with a BA degree in religious studies from the University of Vermont.

He directs the Sky Meadow Institute, a 115-acre organic homestead and retreat center in Stannard, Vermont

Dempsey says his "work focuses on the meaning crisis and the reconstruction of spirituality after postmodernism" and that he is "interested in how we might co-create new conceptions of the sacred that can help us heal our world"...

He coined the term "Metamodernism" to define what comes after Postmodernism. There are semi-annual Metamodern Spirituality Labs, defined as "Explorations into new forms of meaning and spirituality in metamodernity."

He publishes the Metamodern Spirituality Series, currently six volumes, with titles like "Metamodernism and the Return of Transcendence" (volume 1) and "Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World" (volume 6), which sees the emergence of a new God...

The new sciences of complexity have completely revolutionized our understanding of the universe as well as our place in it. At a time when nihilism and meaninglessness are affecting more people than ever, the new cosmic story of complexification comes as a genuine revelation. Evolution, we now know, is not some senseless meandering, but part of an ever-deepening learning process by which the universe is waking up to itself. And, as highly complex, conscious beings, we have a unique role to play in this cosmic drama.

Addressing the meaning crisis head-on, this book synthesizes such insights and explains their profound implications for spirituality and human purpose. Applying a ‘civilizational design’ lens to this endeavor, it boldly presents these ideas in terms of a new religion for our time. Emergentism is the complexity-informed, sincerely ironic, co-created religion for a metamodern moment poised between breakdown and breakthrough. In a time between worlds, at the edge of chaos, the conditions are ripe for a new God to emerge.

Emergentisim, p1.

In his 2022 book, A Universal Learning ProcessThe Evolution of Meaning), he writes...

Sky Meadow Institute was founded in 2023 as an organization dedicated to advancing systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. That’s a succinct, tidy way to try and express a whole bunch of interrelated concerns and efforts. So, what does it really mean? And how does a phrase like that try to tie together content as seemingly disparate as permaculture, psycho-social development, big history, metamodernism, and holistic well-being—topics core to the Institute’s vision?

Systems are dynamic networks that unite many components into an integrated whole—one with new capacities and capabilities. Many elements working together can produce new powers and outcomes that transcend the mere sum of their parts. That’s synergy; that’s emergence—when increasingly complex, energy-unlocking configurations somehow allow for novel forms of depth, strength, vitality, and flourishing.

​But if words like “system” and “complexity” sound too cold and mechanical, just replace them with something more organic. Think generative relationships and relationality, the context-sensitive, the holistic. That’s what Nature is all about, after all. The web of life, interconnection, symbiosis, Gaia. The word “complexity” just means “to weave together,” and that’s what the tapestry of existence ultimately is: an ever more intricate embroidery revealing an ever more refined image of an ever-evolving cosmos.

Forging more intricate relationships is what the Universe does—and keeps doing, since out of those relationships come new entities with entirely new abilities which in turn create the possibility for even more novel relationships to cohere, and so on. So quarks relate to form atoms, atoms relate to form molecules, molecules relate to form cells, etc., all the way up to complex, conscious, caring human beings, who themselves relate to one another to form a vast global society rapidly coming to increasing knowledge of the cosmos. Every “thing,” then, is really a process: a dynamic relational event unfolding in relation to all other dynamic relational events. That’s what the Universe is. That’s what you are—a mind-blowing moment at the edge of this 14-billion-year process of cosmic complexification and evolution, headed for still greater complexity…

Dempsey introduces new language to describe his mission, especially metamodern, to go beyond modern and postmodern...

Today, we need a worldview of complexity if we’re to see civilization, if not life itself, to the end of the 21st century and beyond. Such a worldview sees in the complexification process itself a spiritually profound narrative. Moving beyond modern utilitarianism and postmodern nihilism, we must reframe issues of meaning and purpose within a broader cosmic frame of evolution and productive, care-enhancing integration.

The emerging metamodern paradigm seems to be speaking to such a shift in perspective. A truly metamodern spirituality is precisely that which brings a complexity lens to bear on the things that matter most. Part of that entails looking at the very evolution of worldviews and meaning structures as a process of complexification—a vital, promising, but (as yet) under-explored field of study. More broadly, it entails engaging complexification, integration, and emergence as fundamental dynamics of the self-organizing cosmos—processes in which we ourselves take part through our own journeys of learning, development, integration, and self-transcendence.

Seeing these deep patterns playing out across the fractal spans of self and Universe, stepping into a worldview of worldviews, and learning about learning all help expand our perspective and return a profound sense of meaning to life after epochs of disenchantment and disillusionment. After the revelations of modern and postmodern thought, we are once more, and at long last, learning to find ourselves at home in the universe again—not through naïve projection and assimilation, but through genuine systemic integration into and as a singular, sublime Whole.

Normal | Teacher | Scholar