In an age defined in many ways, Ford believes, by purposelessness and alienation, engaging with fundamental questions of meaning is our “last taboo.” Reflecting on his early life as a child of the sixties, he discusses the general resistance to self-reflection in contemporary culture and highlights the significance of the freedom to question authority that made it possible for him to abandon traditional belief systems and seek out a more all-embracing perspective. That quest ultimately gave rise to his recent book, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, in which he outlines eight basic approaches to meaning-making and boils them down to their bare essentials.
Discussing the pros and cons of these eight different belief systems in this week’s audio release, Ford ends by speculating about what anew worldwide belief system might eventually look like—one that could provide new meaning and purpose for human beings at the outset of the twenty-first century, and help take us all “from darkness to light.”
Dennis Ford graduated from Macalester College and the Iliff School of Theology before earning his Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University. While a graduate student, he studied with both Huston Smith and James Hillman, among others.
Ford has followed a diverse career path, working as a university administrator, publisher, marketing director, and business analyst. For many years, he was associated with Scholars Press, a publisher of books and journals for the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Biblical Literature, and sixteen other academic nonprofits.
In addition to The Search for Meaning, Ford is the author of Sins of Omission: A Primer on Moral Indifference (out of print) as well as occasional articles in the Christian Century, Religion in Life, Soundings, Rock & Ice, and Climbing. He is married, has two adult children, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
