Programming | Life Worth Living | Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Maybe what we need is to ask the deeper question: What is truly worth wanting in the first place?

This question once came pre-answered—by culture, by religion, by tradition—but these days, we each have to ask and answer for ourselves: What is the good life? What does it mean to live a flourishing life? These are difficult questions that require intellectual muscles many of us have never developed; we need one another’s help to ask and answer them well.

Through courses at Yale College, teacher training, collaboration with faculty around the world, and more, the Life Worth Living program equips students, educators, and the public for the lifelong process of discerning, articulating, and pursuing the good life by engaging the world’s philosophical and religious traditions.

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Yale College Courses

Students are eager for opportunities to take up life’s big questions in life-giving learning communities. We offer three courses in Yale college: the original LWL class (HUMS 411), a first-year seminar (HUMS 065), and a course designed around the LWL book (HUMS 280). Each course aims to equip students for the lifelong process of discerning the shape of flourishing life across important and enduring lines of difference.

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Education & the Life Worth Living

A course for first-year students in Yale College: What is an education for? What does it have to do with real life—not just any life, but a life worth living? We will explore these questions through engagement with the visions of five very different ways of imagining the good life and, therefore, of imagining education: the traditions of Confucianism and Christianity and three diverse modern thinkers. By the end, students will be prepared to ask the question of the good life and to put that question at the heart of their college education.

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Life Worth Living Book

This is the book based on the original Yale College course. Around the world and across human history, the same questions have challenged us: What should we hope for? How should we live? How do we respond to suffering? How do we flourish? Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz have gathered responses to these and other questions and reflected on the different answers that have informed various faiths and cultures. They have led students through these findings in one of Yale University’s most popular courses. Now, they have written this book to help you respond to these questions in the context of your own life. Because your life is too important to be guided by anything less than what matters most.

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Hubs

LWL work isn't just happening at Yale. From the US to the UK and Hong Kong, our partners at various hubs around the world are doing amazing work developing programming to help new audiences find their way to flourishing life.

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Higher Education Fellowships

The Life Worth Living Network offers fellowships to encourage undergraduate education on enduring questions about the shape of flourishing life. We connect faculty and graduate students like you, who seek to design and facilitate courses that equip students for the lifelong process of discerning the good life. Together, we envision an educational landscape in which students and faculty learn alongside each other how to ask and respond to life’s biggest questions.

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Secondary Education

The big questions don't wait until college. High school and middle school students are already wrestling with fundamental questions of meaning and purpose. We collaborate with secondary school teachers and administrators to help them develop and implement life-changing curricula for their students.

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Army Chaplaincy

We have worked for many years with the U.S. Army Chaplaincy to support their development of programming to help service members find meaning and purpose. This work has also been adopted as part of a holistic health intervention to decrease suicidality among service members.