Making Meaning in Challenging Times — with Jamie Wheal
About this episode
What helps you make meaning in challenging times? As you confront COVID, the climate crisis, and all of the challenges we discuss on this show, what helps you avoid nihilism or fundamentalism, and instead access healing, inspiration, and connection?
Today on Your Undivided Attention, we're joined by anthropologist and writer Jamie Wheal. Wheal is the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind. In the book, he makes the case that in order to address the meta-crisis — the interconnected challenges we face, which we talked about in Episode 36 with Daniel Schmachtenberger, we must address the meaning crisis — the need to stay inspired, mended, and bonded in challenging times. Jamie argues that it doesn't matter whether we're staying inspired, mended, and bonded through institutionalized religion or other means as long as meaning-making is inclusively available to everyone.
What we hope you'll walk away with is a humane way to think about how to address the challenges we face, from COVID to climate — by enabling us to make meaning in challenging times.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Get every episode summarized
Each time Your Undivided Attention publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.
Email me new episodesFree for 3 shows. No card needed.
Hosts & guests
No transcript yet
This episode has not been transcribed. Request it and it moves to the front of the queue.
More episodes
More from Your Undivided Attention
Flock is Just the Beginning: Inside the Era of AI-Powered Policing
Your Undivided Attention
We Measure What AI Can Do. We Should Measure What It Does to Us.
Your Undivided Attention
Enough Debate about the AI Jobpocalypse. We Need To Plan for the Messy Middle.
Your Undivided Attention
Can AI Be Built in Service of Life? A Conversation with Krista Tippett
Your Undivided Attention