Truth and Service: A Life Worth Living for Social Workers

What does it mean, as a social worker, to live with purpose, integrity, and justice in a complicated world? This course is adapted from the Life Worth Living program developed at Yale University and contextualized within the mission and values of North Carolina Central University, an HBCU grounded in “Truth and Service.”

Students will explore how diverse traditions—religious, philosophical, and cultural—address life’s ultimate questions about meaning, responsibility, suffering, and flourishing. Building on the history of HBCUs and the principle of cultural humility, students will reflect on how race, identity, spirituality, and justice shape what it means to live a good and meaningful life as a social worker.

The course examines figures and traditions such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Robin Wall Kimmerer, A. Helwa, Oscar Wilde, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Analects of Confucius, and African ancestral traditions. Through reflection journals, sacred text analysis, a community wisdom podcast, and a final personal practice philosophy presentation, students will integrate theory, tradition, and personal identity into a vision of what it means to serve clients and communities not only by solving problems, but by helping them pursue lives worth living.