Much contemporary thinking tries to address this by focusing narrowly: on neuroscience alone, or philosophy alone, or spirituality alone. But meaning doesn’t live at just one level. It unfolds across time—biological, psychological, cultural, and historical.
This course takes that challenge seriously by asking a deeper question:
What has mattered, how it has mattered, and how meaning itself has evolved over time.
Matters Over Time traces meaning across multiple scales—without reducing it to any single one.
The journey begins at first principles: meaning as information, relevance, and thermodynamic constraint—grounding human sense-making within the broader story of life and learning systems. From there, the course zooms inward to the individual, exploring how meaning-making unfolds across the human lifespan through developmental models and lived examples.
Then the lens widens again—to the collective. You’ll examine how individual justification systems interlock into worldviews, religions, and cultures, shaping how entire societies understand reality, value, and the Sacred.
Finally, the course turns fully historical—tracking how meaning has transformed across:
early human societies
agrarian civilizations
the Axial Age
modernity, postmodernity, and emerging metamodern frames
Throughout, the same guiding thread remains: how meaning complexifies, stabilizes, fractures, and reforms over time.
Course Curriculum
Case Studies in Meaning
We begin our foray into the world of meaning with a look at short snippets of actual, real-life accounts regarding the meaning of life. Students are invited to attempt to order the excerpts according to whatever logic they like and we will discuss. What (if any) unifying patterns exist amidst such differences in framing matters of ultimate concern? By beginning at the personal level, we get an opportunity to come to know one another better and ground our topic in the lived reality of experience before moving into more abstract, theoretical considerations.
What is Meaning?
We move to the heart of the matter, attempting a “first principles” approach to the question of greatest importance in the world: What is of greatest importance in the world? How do we understand/define ideas like “meaningful,” “significant,” “relevant,” “valuable,” “sacred” and “God”? With our framing, we’ll be able to recognize how meaning is not just limited to socially-constructed human activity, but can actually be traced all the way back through the cosmic evolutionary process to the very fundaments of reality.
The Psychological Angle: Faith Development
With a scale-invariant sense of what “meaning” means across levels of cosmic complexity, we zoom in on the cultural level specifically to examine how human beings engage in the vital act of learning meaningful information. To start, we explore this process on the individual level, where models from developmental psychology such as James Fowler’s Faith Development Theory have helped map the ways people learn to process increasingly complex forms of meaningful information. Fowler’s “stages of faith,” we’ll see, are distinct structures of individual meaning-making that unfold through a process of complexification and expansion. We’ll get a sense for these stages by examining a number of real Faith Development Interviews and note the ways meaning, value, the sacred and God develop across this learning process.
The Sociological Angle: Worldview Studies
We expand our understanding of individual meaning-making by turning to the ways broader collective dynamics of history, enculturation, and social psychology influence the meaning-learning process. How do individual systems of justification and explanation get networked together into collective justification systems and worldviews, and how are these reproduced by a society’s members? In what ways are worldviews isomorphic to the meaning-making ego? From here, we’ll outline a taxonomy of the major worldview structures that will preoccupy us going forward and entertain the question of the sacred’s evolution across distinct cultural memeplexes.
The Ancient Depths of Meaning
Having been introduced to the taxonomy of six major worldviews/meaning systems in the previous lecture, we now explore the first three to dominate the premodern world: those of neolithic foragers, archaic agrarian societies, and the axial age transformations of the first millennium BCE. We consider the ways these worldviews served as adaptive sensemaking strategies in their respective sociocultural contexts, along with the structural limits (psychologically, socially, systemically) that drove further complexification.
Modernity and Purpose
We turn to the myriad ways the advent of modernity changed the meaning landscape as it began to spread around the globe. We will consider the structural transformations that occasioned a profound disruption to traditional worldviews and the rise of new ways of understanding ultimate concern in terms of Progress ideologies of science, freedom, technology, and statism.
Postmodernism and the Deconstruction of Meaning
If modernity offered its own cultural code for structuring meaning after the traditions of the past, the postmodern turn can be understood as yet another dramatic paradigm shift in the way it challenged, undermined, or problematized even these formulations of meaning and significance. Here we will explore the relativization of worldviews that comes to the fore in postmodernity and a number of insights and impasses that have resulted as well as the postmodern sacred.
Metamodern Meaning
Finally, we look at structures of meaning-making that have emerged in response to postmodernism. This nascent meaning structure takes worldviews themselves as units of analysis and integration, finding avenues of reconstruction after deconstruction through a coherent pluralism of coordinated perspectives. We conclude by pondering present society and “the future of meaning.”
FAQ
Are these courses like other online philosophy or spirituality courses?
Not exactly. These courses are not designed as content dumps or self-help programs. They are structured learning journeys that integrate philosophy, cognitive science, history, and spirituality to cultivate deeper understanding, clearer sense-making, and existential relevance, not hacks or techniques.
Do I need prior background in philosophy, cognitive science, or religion?
No formal background is required. The courses are carefully scaffolded and assume curiosity rather than expertise. If you’re willing to read attentively, reflect seriously, and sit with difficult questions, you’ll be able to engage the material meaningfully.
Are these courses practical, or purely theoretical?
They are intellectually rigorous, but never merely abstract. Each course is oriented toward how ideas shape perception, meaning, identity, and lived experience. While these are not “how-to” programs, they are a conceptual foundation for practice, transformation, and orientation in life.
Is this therapy or spiritual direction?
No. These courses are educational and philosophical in nature. They may be personally challenging and transformative, but they are not therapy, pastoral counseling, or clinical intervention. Growth here comes through understanding, dialogue, and reflection.
How much time should I expect to commit?
Most courses are designed to be manageable alongside work or study. Expect time for watching lectures, doing assigned readings (where applicable), and reflective integration. The depth you get out of the course will largely reflect the care you bring to it.
Are these courses connected to one another, or can I take them independently?
Each course stands on its own, but they are also part of a larger, coherent intellectual and pedagogical arc across The Lectern. Many learners find that taking multiple courses deepens understanding as ideas recur, evolve, and interconnect across contexts.
Will this challenge my beliefs?
Possibly. These courses do not aim to persuade you toward a particular ideology or worldview, but they do invite you to examine assumptions, inherited frameworks, and habitual ways of making meaning. Challenge here is a feature, not a flaw.