Life Worth Living Key Principles

We equip students for the lifelong process of discerning and living the answers to the fundamental question of our lives: “What is the shape of flourishing life?” Students are hungry for opportunities to delve into historical and contemporary religious and philosophical answers to the big questions of life, and to rigorously reflect on their own answers within a carefully designed curriculum.

We include a diverse range of religious and philosophical perspectives—not as mere anthropological data, but as “live options” that make truth claims with bearing on our lives. The social fact of cultural, religious, and ideological diversity around the globe and in our neighborhoods is difficult to make sense of. Many young people confuse the fact of disagreement with the idea that, therefore, there are no answers. We aim to convene truth-seeking conversations about fundamental questions within pluralistic contexts. Ultimately, we strive toward a world where deep reflection on the good life is central to undergraduate education and public discourse in pluralistic communities.

Personal investment is essential to the Life Worth Living approach. We invite students and instructors to ask what makes life most worth living and to reply with their lives. Courses pair rigorous philosophical and religious textual engagement with the tools for examining and shaping students’ own commitments. Discussions and assignments are crafted to inspire dialogue between course texts and lived experience, while guest practitioners lend insight into the particularities of their visions of the good life. As they move through the Life Worth Living approach, students are better equipped to articulate their present, ever-revisable vision of a life worth living and to test the reality of living it.

We attend carefully to convening life-giving, holistic learning communities in which students and instructors together strive to answer life’s biggest questions. We convene life-giving learning communities that offer space for students and instructors to be their whole selves and to marry their most profound existential questions with the best of their intellectual energies. Invited to draw on their personal histories and daily lives throughout the course, participants are taught to critically examine philosophical and religious texts but also each others’ lives. Offering a model of vulnerability, humility, and empathy paired with intellectual rigor, we ask students to hold each other accountable to the pursuit of existential meaning. Cohorts of Life Worth Living students emerge with the courage and tools to have conversations that matter within and far beyond campus life.