Unbelievable? The Meaning Crisis Explained...Is Modernity Killing Meaning? John Vervaeke and Malcolm Guite hosted by John Nelson
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Apr 9, 2026 
Malcolm Guite, poet and Anglican priest who explores myth and poetic imagination, and John Vervaeke, cognitive scientist and philosopher focused on the meaning crisis and wisdom. They discuss the collapse of non-propositional ways of knowing, the role of imagination, myth and poetic truth, how modernity separated mind and world, and practical paths back via practices, community and pilgrimage.
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Propositional Tyranny Eroded Shared Ways Of Knowing
- The meaning crisis is a loss of communal binding where propositional facts dominate and procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing are sidelined.
- John Vervaeke argues modernity created a "propositional tyranny," eroding embodied skills, shared perspectives, and practices that generate belonging and wisdom.
Nonpropositional Knowings Do The Heavy Lifting For Meaning
- Non-propositional knowing — procedural, perspectival, participatory — does the heavy lifting for connectedness and meaning.
- Vervaeke links these to metacognition, skills, and embodied metaphors (gestures) that enable shared understanding.
Imagination Is An Organ Of Meaning
- Modernity's Cartesian split privileged analytic reason and reduced imagination to a private, non-truth-bearing zone, causing epistemological apartheid between facts and meaning.
- Malcolm Guite defends imagination as an organ of meaning that "bodies forth the form of things unknown," essential for truths not accessible to analysis alone.
