Steven Cassedy is the author of six previous books, including To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (Princeton, 1997), Dostoevsky's Religion (Stanford, 2005), and Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Stanford, 2014), which won a gold medal in US history at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). He retired as a Distinguished Professor of Literature and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Diego, in 2018 and now lives with his wife Patrice, a playwright, in Riverdale, Bronx.
* Introduction. This Shifting, Ubiquitous Word
* Chapter 1. The Ancient World Got Along without it till the Rise of
Christianity
* Chapter 2. Christianity, Scripture, and "Reading" the World, from
Augustine to Bishop Berkeley
* Chapter 3. Idealism and Romanticism: From the Language of Nature to
the Meaning of Life (or The World)
* Chapter 4. Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson Bring the "Mystery
of Existence" and the "Sense of Life" to the English-Speaking World
* Chapter 5. Two Russian Titans Weigh in
* Chapter 6. Paul Tillich: Bridge to the Twentieth Century and the "Age
of Anxiety"
* Chapter 7. Meaning in the Age of Anxiety and Well Beyond
* Chapter 8. Meaning Goes Clinical, Therapeutic, and Popular
* Chapter 9. Meaning Bridges the Secular, the Secular Sacred, and the
Sacred
* Conclusion. The Marvel of Meaning
