Life Worth Living | 7-Week Course

Apply today for the October 4 – November 14, 2022 Life Worth Living Course

What is the shape of flourishing life?

This question rests at the crux of The Faith Initiative at Grace Farms Foundation and provides the framework for a seven-week course offered by Dr. Matthew Croasmun, Faith Initiative Director and Director of the Life Worth Living Program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Life Worth Living engages a range of philosophical and religious traditions to facilitate conversation on questions of meaning and purpose in our lives.

In preparation for each week, participants read a set of religious and philosophical texts (no more than 30 pages) advocating different tradition’s answers to these questions. During class participants discuss what they’ve read—putting Confucius in conversation with Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison in dialogue with the Rabbis—with a goal to better understand the stakes of the questions and the trade-offs made by different answers.

Participants then write their own (provisional) answers to the question in light of what they’ve read and discussed, and share what they’ve written so they can continue to learn from one another’s insights. The rich experience of discovery and insight that ensues is outlined in more detail below in an essay by Dr. Croasmun.

by, Matthew Croasmun, Faith Initiative Director

Several years ago, when I first taught “Life Worth Living” at Yale a student remarked to me: “You mean to tell me that the world’s religious and philosophical traditions have been asking and answering the question of flourishing life for three thousand years, and now I’m supposed to invent my own answer—on my own and in my free time?!”

There’s something really relatable about this student’s protest. The question of flourishing life—what sort of life we should be aiming at for ourselves, for our families, and for our world—is the most important question of our lives. Surely it deserves more than some quick thinking as my student suggested. And yet, who among us has the time and energy to sort it out? And how can we grapple with what sort of life is worthy of our humanity on our own?

Grace Farms offers a seven-week Life Worth Living course designed to help individuals meet these challenges. Our convictions:

We do have to answer these questions.

The fundamental questions of life are ours to answer. We will never become “experts” with respect to questions like these, and we can’t get somebody else to answer them for us. Much of what we do in the course is oriented around coming to terms with the impossibility of gaining expertise and our inalienable responsibility to answer nonetheless.

We don’t have to do it alone.

Having to answer these questions for ourselves doesn’t mean having to answer them by ourselves. There is so much wisdom in community: in people’s experiences, in their insights, and in their practices. The course gathers diverse groups from different religious and non-religious traditions and puts us in conversation with one another.

We don’t have to do it in our free time.

In fact, we probably shouldn’t. For many of us, “free time” doesn’t exist; if we wait for some before taking up these questions, we will watch our lives pass us by. The structure of the course helps us carve out the time and space we all know we need to wrestle meaningfully with life’s greatest questions.

We should do it in dialogue with the world’s traditions.

We’re not the first to ask these questions. The world’s traditions have been asking them for millennia. The course integrates texts from a number of religious and philosophical traditions to help us ask better questions and stitch our answers together to form coherent visions of life.