The Metanexus Network began as a global constellation of interdisciplinary communities exploring foundational questions at the intersection of science and spirituality. Growing out of the Local Societies Initiative and later the Metanexus Global Network Initiative, these groups brought together scientists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars to engage questions of meaning, personhood, consciousness, and human purpose beyond the limits of any single discipline.
The original Network focused on two core commitments: dialogue between scientific and spiritual traditions, and transdisciplinary inquiry into the assumptions shaping human understanding. These communities served as spaces for rigorous conversation, intellectual experimentation, and resistance to fragmentation driven by excessive specialization.
Today, Metanexus carries this legacy forward while expanding its scope. As cultural, technological, and existential pressures reshape what it means to be human, the Network is evolving into a broader ecology of communities exploring new ways of being human. Building on its foundational roots, the renewed Network emphasizes lived inquiry, experimentation, and creative engagement with emerging forms of knowledge, practice, and community.
The Metanexus Network is no longer only a site of dialogue, but a space for shared exploration—where inherited questions meet present realities, and new possibilities are allowed to take shape.
Metanexus Groups
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Au Sable Institute Graduate Fellows Program
Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies Grand Rapids, Michigan This initiative seeks to raise up “a generation of leaders for a new century to help meet the challenges of humankind’s growing power in and over creation”. The LSI expansion of the Au Sable Graduate Fellows Program includes a science and religion dialogue project, with outreach
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Awe Inspiring Experiences: Natural, Unnatural, and Supernatural
University of California, Los Angeles This interdisciplinary group convenes to explore the many aspects of awe-inspiring experiences with the aim of understanding the human ability to experience awe. The working group, representing scholars of religion, culture, politics, neuroscience, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, biology, and communication endeavors to develop and present an undergraduate course on their findings,
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Baconian Society of Union University
Union University Jackson, Tennessee The Society for Science-Faith Dialogue is an organization open to membership by faculty, students, professionals, and others interested in the science-faith dialogue. The Society will encourage, facilitate, and promote the science-faith dialogue within the Union University community, among sister institutions of higher learning, and throughout the broader scientific and religious communities