About Me
Hey there, I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan. I’m a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America.
I’m also the founder of Beauty at Work, a project which includes a podcast and YouTube channel exploring how beauty shapes our lives and our work.
I’m planning to use this Substack as a public notebook to share some research and work out some ideas about what I’m calling our “horizons of worth.”
The idea of horizons of worth is inspired by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor talks about "horizons of significance" as the shared backgrounds and frameworks we use to make sense of who we are and what matters to us—the reference points we rely on to evaluate different actions, identities, and ways of life. My interest is more in how we (at personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels) determine what has worth and why, how our collective choices shape what we come to regard as worthy or unworthy, and how we navigate conflicts between differing conceptions of worth.
I approach these issues more as a social scientist than a philosopher, but these questions form a thread that runs all the way from my childhood through the past couple of decades of my research, continuing today in the various empirical projects I’m working on, which are related to beauty, spirituality, mental health, innovation, and institutional flourishing. Of course, these themes represent only a handful of the many possible horizons of worth—I won't pretend to cover them all. Here, I'll share ideas-in-progress, essays, personal reflections, and notes on themes such as:
Where do we derive our sense of worth from? On what basis do we assign worth to things, to ourselves, and to others? And how are our conceptions of worth changing in a technology-driven age?
What are institutions? Why do we need them? What does it take for them to flourish rather than flounder?
Why do experiences of beauty matter so deeply to us—and what can we learn from them?
What is “innovation” and why has it become a key indicator of worth in our times, across diverse domains? To what extent is it a helpful lens through which to study religious and spiritual change?
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