Our latest online course, Realizing the Imaginal, is now open for registration!
Click the image below for more information.
We are at a turning point in our globalized culture that calls us to radically transform how we come to know and participate in ourselves, each other and the world.
There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, and suicide rates in North America, parts of Europe, and more.
This mental health crisis is itself due to, and engaged with, crises in the environment and the political system.
Those in turn are enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis that I call...
“The Meaning Crisis”.
The Lectern is a place to learn, dialogue, and reflect on our relationship to the life and times we are in.
John's Story So Far
The Lectern Ecosystem
There are two main ways of engaging with John's work on The Lectern:
Courses
Full eight-week lecture series that you can purchase separately to attend live or study at your own pace.
Membership
Engage in fellowship with other students through forums, exclusive videos and live Q&As for a monthly fee.
Online Courses
The Lectern is oriented towards the co-creation of knowledge between John and the students. Live, weekly lectures with Q&As let you bring your ideas and inquiries into an interactive, dialogical context. Be at the forefront of the best arguments from John and his contemporaries, as well as legacy thinkers throughout history.
These courses aim to get us somewhere that no one of us, including John, could get to alone.
If this sounds like how you would like to learn, please consider enrolling in our latest course: Realizing the Imaginal here.
Upcoming Courses
Following Realizing the Imaginal, the rest of the 2025 Season will comprise of a three-part lecture series on the cognitive science of religion, Seeing God Again for the First Time. Across 24 lectures, John will explore the role religion plays in our cognitive psychological development, culminating in a philosophical stance for spirituality in our modern society.
May 2025
August 2025
October 2025
Self-Study Courses
Previous courses John has taught on the Lectern are available for purchase. Each lecture is chaptered into digestible segments with reflective assignments to facilitate your learning. You will also gain access to the Lectern Lounge channel for the course where you can post questions and discuss the course with past and present students.
Einstein and Spinoza's God
In this 8-week course, John will draw on theology, cognitive science and philosophy to argue for a non-theistic stance toward the sacred. If you find yourself torn between rationality and spirituality, science and mysticism, facts and belief; The Lectern's inaugural 8-week course will offer you a new lens through which to reflect on these dilemmas.
(Available Dec 2024)
Literature of the Meaning Crisis
The greatest heralds of human grief are not philosophers, but artists. In this 8-week course, John will explore some of the most significant literary figures of the meaning crisis, powerful works of literature that depicted the fitfulness and existential agony of the modern person, and his unsheltered encounter with the numinous.
(Available Jan 2025)
YouTube Series
Over the past few years, John has spent his time publishing free long-form series on YouTube, including the epic 50-hour-long Awakening From The Meaning Crisis and his podcast series, Voices with Vervaeke. You can view any of these series by clicking the thumbnails below!
Awakening From The Meaning Crisis
Prof. Vervaeke's flagship series that has received international acclaim. Combining philosophy, history, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, it explores the wisdom (and foolishness) of the past to prepare an intelligent response for the future.
After
Socrates
Following Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is an extensive genealogy into the elusive figure of Socrates: his uncanny persona, his famously wise ignorance, his singular influence on human thought, and the various thinkers that have evolved his legacy.
Voices With
Vervaeke
In this series, John dialogues with individuals whose actions and ideas are working to respond to the meaning crisis, and bring wisdom into practice and culture. Guests include scholars, pastors, authors, psychologists, teachers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and more.
Memberships
The Lectern Lounge offers a range of material across different formats in conversation and fellowship with contemporary thinkers. These include professors, practitioners and leaders that John engages with to help integrate knowledge and bridge connections into territories which might otherwise be left undiscovered.
Interact with fellow members!
Available now!
Submit your questions for John to answer live!
Starts Jan 2025
Long-form conversations with expert scholars and thinkers
Season 1 available now!
Live conference-style talk with a guest speaker followed by a live Q&A!
Starts Jan 2025
Guaranteed live entry to all of John's 2025 courses
First course commences Feb 7th 2025
Quarterly 1-on-1 meeting with John!
5 spots remaining
Starts Mar 2025
Prof. John Vervaeke
John Vervaeke, Ph.D. is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology.
He currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight problem solving, cognitive development with a focus on the dynamical nature of development, and higher cognitive processes with an emphasis on intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom.
He is the director of the Cognitive Science program where he also teaches courses on the introduction to Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science of consciousness wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness.
In addition, he taught a course in the Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science for fifteen years. He is the director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students’ Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award.
He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is the first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century crisis which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
