Brendan Graham Dempsey

Metatheory Team; Cultural Complexity Index Leader 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 and, most recently, 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.

Faith Development Pathway

The Faith Development Pathway (FDP) is a pioneering initiative dedicated to creating the world’s first open-access protocol for the developmental maturation of faith and ultimate concern. Building on James Fowler’s influential stages of faith and advancing them through the neo-Piagetian lens of hierarchical complexity scoring—specifically via the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS)—the FDP systematically charts the evolving cognitive and existential architecture of human meaning-making. Its goal is to rationally reconstruct the topography of healthy faith development across the lifespan and democratize this knowledge through accessible tools, assessments, and pedagogical applications. By equipping educators, spiritual leaders, curriculum designers, and social innovators with a scientifically rigorous and spiritually attuned developmental framework, the FDP aims to support both horizontal and vertical growth in faith across diverse populations. Envisioned as an incubator for a future Faith Development Institute, the initiative seeks to steward, refine, and disseminate this integrative protocol across disciplines, traditions, and global contexts.

The Cultural Complexity Index

The Cultural Complexity Index (CCI) initiative aims to quantify and analyze human cultural complexification across history. By applying advanced hierarchical complexity scoring to diverse cultural artifacts, the CCI will provide the first comprehensive dataset on cultural evolution. This project seeks to move cultural complexification theories from speculative sociology to empirical science, challenging relativistic academic paradigms and fostering more integrative approaches to today's complex global challenges. Through academic publications and public engagement, the CCI aims to catalyze a paradigm shift in understanding cultural evolution, offering crucial insights for addressing the intricate problems of our time.

Encyclopedia of Big Pictures

Taking the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as inspiration, the Encyclopedia of Big Pictures will be a free online resource that defines the relevant terms and concepts for the growing body of philosophical work underlying integrative metatheories.