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.
Practically, the course divides the question of flourishing life into seven component questions and takes up one question each week:
What does it mean to belong?
While each of us needs to answer these questions for ourselves, we do so from within networks of belonging, on the one hand, and alienation, on the other. In fact, the journey from alienation to mutual belonging may mark the path to flourishing life in important ways. So, as we begin, we’ll start by taking account of the ways our lives and our world is marked by estrangement and belonging. And we’ll begin to puzzle together about how the world should be: What is our place within the natural world? Where do we belong and with whom?
To whom are we responsible?
This is the question that frames everything else. The question here isn’t just what responsibilities do we have and to whom. Centrally, the question is to whom are we responsible for the shape of our lives? Who do we answer to? Who calls us to account?
How does a good life feel?
These first three questions together describe what we might call the “three dimensions of flourishing life.” This first question gets at the first: the emotional or affective dimension of life. For many these days, it can seem patently obvious: life flourishes when we feel a certain way—“happy,” we usually say, though we each probably mean something really different when we say it. But not every tradition has shared this intuition with us. How would it change our lives if what we were aiming at was contentment or joy—or what if we were convinced that feeling a certain way simply wasn’t the point?
What does it mean for life to go well?
This question gets at the circumstantial dimension of life. What sorts of circumstances are required or beneficial for flourishing? A healthy bank account? Love and respect? Peace? Justice? Or is true flourishing found in an ability to transcend life’s circumstances? What are we after: deep commitment and attachment to the world around us or wise non-attachment to a world that is always changing?
How should we live?
This question gets at the agential dimension of life. While each of us is constrained in significant ways, we each exercise some degree of agency in our lives; how should we exercise that agency? How should we lead our lives? Should we aim at good outcomes—helping other people, for example, feel happy or improve their circumstances? Or is leading one’s life well a matter of cultivating certain virtues or adhering carefully to a set of principles?
What role does suffering play in a good life?
This question is the flipside of the questions about flourishing affect and circumstances. Whatever we say about good (or even ideal) feelings and circumstances, we know that life doesn’t always feel or go the way we hope. Lives aimed at happiness are often full of sorrow. The best plans to secure the circumstances we take to be most valuable sometimes fail. What should we do with the suffering that inevitably comes? Is suffering a sign we’ve lost our way? Does flourishing as a human being require that we find meaning in our suffering? If so, how do we do that? What are our responsibilities to the suffering of others?
What should we do when we fail?
Life is full of failure: professional, personal, etc. With this question, we’re asking about a more profound sort of falling short. What should we do when we fail to live as we should? Shake it off and try harder next time? Repent and ask for forgiveness? Reframe our failure as something else entirely? Whatever our ideals, having strategies for managing those moments when we fall short is crucial.
