Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World
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.
About the Author(s)
Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, poet, farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. He holds a BA in religious studies from the University of Vermont and a master’s in religion and art from Yale University. He is the author of the 7-volume Metamodern Spirituality Series as well as Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.
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