The goal of this project is to assess the state of the field, identify areas for collaboration, and direct future research on the intersection of meaning and morality. ‘Meaning’ can be ill-defined and may differ across academic disciplines. Therefore, we use the notion of worldview as a system of meaning to provide specificity and scaffolding for our project.
A worldview can be conceptualized as a socially constructed system of knowledge, language, values, ultimate goals, social norms, and behaviors. In some sense, religion is a prototypical worldview, a coherent system of meaning that can provide direction when facing foundational life questions. Although a religious worldview may have provided clear answers to existential questions, ultimate goals, and moral dilemmas in the past, the picture today is much more complex, given the bricolage of beliefs, goals, values, and social norms that make up what we refer to as the Mosaic Worldviews of the many religious, spiritual-but-not-religious, post-religious, and non-religious people living in the U.S.
Our goal is to bring together scholars from across disciplines to develop a program of research to better understand how the various elements of Mosaic worldviews influence morality and moral decision-making in modernity. Specifically, we plan to (1) conduct 15 interviews with an interdisciplinary group of scholars, (2) award six year-long fellowship grants to early-career researchers, (3) establish collaborations between six senior scholars and the fellowship grantees, and (4) bring together the six mentored pairs to a convening aimed at identifying key areas for future research.
Key outputs will include the interdisciplinary convening, a scoping review and theory paper, at least two manuscripts produced by fellowship grantees, two public podcasts, and a proposal for a larger project suitable for various funding agencies advancing the project’s recommendations for future work on meaning and morality.
