A Life That's Worth Living

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.

Developed by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.

Made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Transcript

Abdullah Antepli: Life worth living is an opportunity shift paradigm. Is there a way in which you can enhance and enrich your intellectual world to see things differently? Are there opportunities to trickle this intellectual wealth of information, richness of information into your soul and heart?

Angela Williams Gorrell: The texts become other voices that we listen to and that challenge us, but for me the thing that happens in the dialogue between participants in the learning community, that encounter is what's been the most powerful thing for me.

Casey Strine: Insofar as there's an outcome we're trying to achieve, it's practicing becoming more comfortable and more skilled at having conversations across lines of enduring difference. It's exciting intellectually, but it's also crucial for our social and political being with one another.

Angela Williams Gorrell: Life worth living is a way of being in the world. It's a practice. It's a way of existing in the world and dialoguing with other people that becomes a natural way of then participating in society,

Casey Strine: One of the things I say to my students over and over again, some of whom will have never really read Marx directly, or Nietzsche directly, or the Buddha directly, is that you are absolutely worthy of that kind of engagement.

Angela Williams Gorrell: Life Worth Living opened my eyes to the experiences, the habits, the values, and the beliefs of people across different religious and philosophical traditions, and suddenly I could empathize and understand and connect with people that were different from me in a way that I never quite had before.

Casey Strine: The thing about Life Worth Living is that we just recognize you're bringing your whole self into the classroom. That requires a level of patience and a level of willingness to say, sometimes this is going to be easy, and sometimes this is going to be hard.

Abdullah Antepli: As Mary Oliver says, doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? So how can we live a life that is worth living?