At first glance, or even third, one might have difficulty seeing the connection between these three books. However, each makes a significant argument for the life of the church in this divisive age. How can Christians with divergent beliefs and markedly different political positions communicate with one another? How can the fractured church communicate to…

In our previous post, we compared the role of Christian professors with that of the Old Testament prophets as “stewards of truth.” Following the model of the prophets of the Old Testament, we are required to maintain the truth of our respective disciplines, deliver it convincingly in the classroom, and continuously refine it to apply…

Serving as a Christian university professor is not the most celebrated job in America. It is not an ignoble profession, but few of us would describe ourselves as overpaid. Most of us are exempt from federal minimum wage and overtime laws. One would think the years of education required to serve as a professor would…

One of the most ambitious attempts to answer the question of human flourishing appears in Tyler VanderWeele’s A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing. An epidemiologist whose work has helped shape contemporary research on flourishing, VanderWeele engages many of the themes explored by earlier writers—meaning in the face of suffering, justice within community, and…

What if the attributes of flourishing could be identified, defined, and studied as a social phenomenon, allowing those insights to inform interventions designed to improve well-­being and happiness? What if science itself could be harnessed to advance human flourishing? Many social scientists pursued enthusiastic answers to these questions. The chief architect of what would become…

In the immediate post-­war period, the writers representing Flourishing 1.0 primarily examined the crises of flourishing within the interior life—questions of meaning, selfhood, and the courage required to live amid despair. Yet they were also attentive to the broader cultural forces that produced such crises. Tillich, for example, warned that political systems such as Communism…