Forthcoming Fall 2026 · Wipf & Stock / Pickwick
Mediated by Meaning
Consciousness and Conversion in the Thought of Jordan Peterson
Get notified at launchPeterson diagnosed the wound. Lonergan mapped the anatomy. This book is the argument that follows.
About the book
Jordan Peterson speaks to a crisis everyone feels but almost no one can name. His retrieval of mythological and Jungian frameworks points toward something real: a rupture between the meanings Western culture inherited and the secular structures that now house them. But the diagnosis outruns the philosophy behind it.
Bernard Lonergan provides that philosophy. His cognitional theory — the structured movement from experience through understanding and judgment to decision — gives Peterson's insights the architecture they implicitly require. His distinction between classicist and empirical culture explains why modernity finds itself inhabiting ruins it can no longer interpret. His account of intellectual and moral conversion shows what authentic self-authorship actually demands, not psychologically, but philosophically.
Mediated by Meaning brings them into formal conversation for the first time. This is an argument about consciousness: what it means to own one's knowing, and why that ownership is the precondition for everything else.
Endorsements
Many are the legitimate aficionados of Lonergan who, understandably so, keep a wary distance from Peterson, and many are the Peterson acolytes who know little or nothing about the layered and nuanced insights of Lonergan. It takes a creative, judicious, and synthesizing mind and imagination to see where Lonergan and Peterson meet and why. Mediated by Meaning by Steven Umbrello has done what seems to be the impossible, but he has midwifed a dialogue between Lonergan and Peterson in a discerning and convincing way. This is, indeed, a 10-bell book worthy of many a meditative read, the path taken worth the walking and destination reached worthy of a fuller dia-logos.
Ron Dart
Professor Emeritus, University of the Fraser Valley & Saint Stephen's University; Author of Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson
In 2016, when JP was catapulted to international fame—notoriety, according to many—it was as if a flare had gone off at night, illuminating the disposition of forces on a battlefield. Many were shocked both by the outpouring of vitriol aimed at this individual and by the passionate defense mounted by his followers, no one more than Peterson himself, who, up to this point, had spent his academic career conscientiously wrestling with meaning in the service of clinical psychology. To understand our current cultural moment, one simply must grasp the Peterson phenomenon. Steven Umbrello's Mediated by Meaning offers a vital resource for those willing to take up this challenge.
Stephen Dunning
Co-founder & Co-director, Inklings Institute of Canada, Trinity Western University, Canada
In Mediated by Meaning, Steven Umbrello undertakes a thoroughgoing integration of the thought of Jordan Peterson and Bernard Lonergan. Through his clear and rigorous analysis, Umbrello reveals the complementarity of Peterson's and Lonergan's ideas. He argues that Lonergan's general method for “integrating cognition, values, and human decision-making” can bring greater coherence to Peterson's important psychological and cultural insights. At the same time, Umbrello shows how Peterson's practical orientation puts meat on the bones of Lonergan's abstract framework. This level-headed treatment of two major thinkers should be read by anyone interested in how meaning and value are created and transformed.
David Dennen
Assistant Professor of Applied English, Chihlee University of Technology, Taiwan
In his new book Mediated by Meaning, Steven Umbrello puts into conversation one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Bernard Lonergan, and one of the most influential psychologists of the 21st century, Jordan Peterson. Umbrello combines Lonergan's rigorous philosophical method and Peterson's clinical psychology to provide readers with new ways of thinking about some of the most important questions facing us today.
Christopher Kaczor
President, American Catholic Philosophical Association & Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, USA
The book releases Fall 2026 through Wipf & Stock / Pickwick Publications. Subscribe to Mediated by Meaning on Substack to follow the ideas as they develop — and to be the first to know when it's available.
Subscribe on Substack