Browse Content
Life Worth Living is an initiative of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School.
Berea Univ
Designing a Life Worth Living
Ian Norris is Director of the Entrepreneurship for the Public Good (EPG) program at Berea College, where he holds appointments in both Marketing and Psychology.
Where are you going—and how will you get there? This course helps you explore what matters most, design your college journey, and build a life worth living.
Listen on
Designing a Life Worth Living
Berea University
Taught by J. Ian Norris
Course Description
Explorations introduces students to the joy of studying the liberal arts while cultivating the skills needed for future academic success. Each course investigates a subject of faculty choosing from beyond a single disciplinary approach, incorporating multiple ways of understanding that subject and working with evidence from different academic and popular sources. Students will engage in scholarly practices foundational to inquiry and future academic success, including reading, annotating, and taking notes on texts; analyzing and evaluating sources; drafting, revising, and editing writing; and working with peers. Assignments and activities will cultivate students’ abilities to think analytically.
Where are you going, and how will you get there? These are the overarching questions that will define the next four years of your Berea College experience. On the one hand, you will be exploring majors, minors, co-curricular experiences, and specific courses of interest. Will you study your passion—history, philosophy, or art? Will you choose a discipline that provides a clearer path to financial security, like business or computer science? And how will you navigate the transition to young adulthood—your social and romantic relationships, your evolving relationship to your family, the decisions that you will have to make about how to care for yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually? In this course, we will read Designing Your Life, a blueprint for figuring out how to get what you want out of life. But we will also read Life Worth Living, which will help us understand what is worth wanting out of life and why. Through additional first-source readings from religion, philosophy, psychology, and social science, and through carefully constructed reflective and persuasive essay assignments, you will come to understand yourself holistically, as a person of inherent worth and value. You will explore your interests and passions in order to best determine what to study and how to construct your four-year college experience. But you will do so in a spiritually and psychologically-informed context as to who we are as human beings and what truly contributes to well-being.
Required Texts
Burnett & Evans (2017). Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. New York: Knopf.
Volf, M., Croasmun, M., & McAnnally-Linz, R. (2023). Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Viking/Penguin Random House.
Other assigned texts are identified in the course calendar and posted in Moodle.
Designing a Life Worth Living
Berea University
Taught by J. Ian Norris
Course Description
Explorations introduces students to the joy of studying the liberal arts while cultivating the skills needed for future academic success. Each course investigates a subject of faculty choosing from beyond a single disciplinary approach, incorporating multiple ways of understanding that subject and working with evidence from different academic and popular sources. Students will engage in scholarly practices foundational to inquiry and future academic success, including reading, annotating, and taking notes on texts; analyzing and evaluating sources; drafting, revising, and editing writing; and working with peers. Assignments and activities will cultivate students’ abilities to think analytically.
Where are you going, and how will you get there? These are the overarching questions that will define the next four years of your Berea College experience. On the one hand, you will be exploring majors, minors, co-curricular experiences, and specific courses of interest. Will you study your passion—history, philosophy, or art? Will you choose a discipline that provides a clearer path to financial security, like business or computer science? And how will you navigate the transition to young adulthood—your social and romantic relationships, your evolving relationship to your family, the decisions that you will have to make about how to care for yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually? In this course, we will read Designing Your Life, a blueprint for figuring out how to get what you want out of life. But we will also read Life Worth Living, which will help us understand what is worth wanting out of life and why. Through additional first-source readings from religion, philosophy, psychology, and social science, and through carefully constructed reflective and persuasive essay assignments, you will come to understand yourself holistically, as a person of inherent worth and value. You will explore your interests and passions in order to best determine what to study and how to construct your four-year college experience. But you will do so in a spiritually and psychologically-informed context as to who we are as human beings and what truly contributes to well-being.
Required Texts
Burnett & Evans (2017). Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. New York: Knopf.
Volf, M., Croasmun, M., & McAnnally-Linz, R. (2023). Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Viking/Penguin Random House.
Other assigned texts are identified in the course calendar and posted in Moodle.
Keep browsing
Join the LWL Community
