Over the past twenty years, the needs of university students have changed significantly. As Jonathan Haidt adeptly chronicles in his Anxious Generation, mental health and loneliness, depression, and anxiety are rampant among today’s youth. COVID only exacerbated this. Recognizing these challenges, two Whitworth professors from disparate disciplines set out to craft a course to address the needs of this generation.
Psychology professor, Joelle Czirr, and theology professor, Josh Leim, in conversation, prayer, and fasting alongside faculty colleagues from across campus, spent more than a year developing what would become Whitworth’s new freshmen seminar: A Flourishing Life. The course introduces principles, practices, and processes of flourishing—physical, social, psychological, and spiritual.
I am blessed to be part of the teaching team for this first iteration of the course. From my anecdotal perspective, now seven weeks into the semester, I can attest to its positive impact on students. Absences are down; eyes are raised; friendships are budding. Though obviously not a panacea for all the ills of Generation Z, the course seems destined to move them in a positive direction.
The following are excerpts from the framework that was created for the course by Drs. Czirr and Leim. Thanks to these colleagues for allowing me to share their good work here.
The topics of well-being, belonging, character development, and flourishing have become pervasive topics across university campuses. 89% of high school parents report that university services targeted at students’ mental health and wellness impact their decision to apply or attend (Princeton Review, 2025). The World Health Organization (WHO) named stress as a global epidemic prior to the emergence of COVID-19. The American College Health Association (2022) found that 75% of students report moderate to severe psychological stress. Furthermore, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy named loneliness as a major public health concern. With such statistics and the growing focus on student capacity to be successful in college considering mental health concerns, it seems paramount that universities address student wellbeing from an interdisciplinary, co-curricular approach….
For our unique context, we define human flourishing from a reformed, evangelical, and ecumenical Christian perspective. As such, we believe a Christian vision of human flourishing most fundamentally consists in the knowledge, experience, and practice together of the reconciling love of God revealed in Jesus Christ and made present to the world by the Holy Spirit. God’s reconciling love renews God’s image in us, a renewal that makes possible the communion for which we were made—with God and one another—and empowers us to be agents of justice, mercy, and faithfulness in God’s good world (Matt. 23:23). More, because of God’s ubiquitous grace and presence throughout the world by the Holy Spirit, all humans can begin to participate in flourishing through the knowledge, experience, and practice of a way of life that consists in loving communion with one another and in seeking to be agents of justice, mercy, and faithfulness. As a succinct way of putting it, we are envisioning flourishing as an embodied vision of life together to restore the communion and agency for which we were made….
Several universities around the country have implemented well-being centers and initiatives for flourishing. Hirshberg et. al. (2022) in a multi-university study found that academic courses that included experiential flourishing, such as the practice of mindfulness in class, increased student mental health, flourishing, attention, social happiness emotional skills, and prosocial behaviors. Christianity Today (2025), in a review of Christian Colleges whose enrollment was growing, found that a key aspect to growth was related to institutions that clearly articulate their vision and help shape students personally and vocationally.
Whitworth University’s shared liberal arts curriculum expresses the value of bringing together both intellectual rigor and experiential engagement in course content. For best learning outcomes, this course is designed to encourage students to explore, reflect on, and apply principles of flourishing through a variety of distinct and interrelated disciplines and perspectives. By exploring facets of flourishing, students will develop a foundation, preparing them to collaborate on campus, in the community, and contribute to the world in a meaningful way. The explore, reflect on, and apply foundation will take the form of the 3 P’s Format: Principle, Practice, Process.
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Physical Flourishing
We believe students must begin with what it means to flourish physically. Theologically speaking, both Genesis and John—creation and incarnation—speak to the irreducibly physical reality of our human existence. More, psychologically speaking, the self is bound up at the most basic level with our physical, embodied experience. The image of God begins with our physical bodies and the created order in which we dwell. “Christian engagement with mental health must begin with the earthiness of our bodies. We are dust. But there is more: we are dust that has been formed by God to be fit for relationship” (Kinghorn, 2024, p. 66). This unit will thus explore the role of embodiment for human flourishing and its importance in developing a coherent, meaningful sense of self. For example, a well-rested student has the capacity and energy to engage with life. The student who moves their body will experience more cognitive clarity and stability of mood. The student who eats mindfully will feed their brain the nutrients needed to ask the big questions, such as who am I, who is God, and what is a life worthy of my humanity.
Social Flourishing
Just as our physical bodies are conduits of healing and image-bearing, these bodies cannot survive in isolation. John Cacioppo, pioneer of the field of social neuroscience, spent much of his career researching and addressing the lethality of loneliness. Rene Spitz in the 1940’s coined the phrase “failure to thrive,” referring to infants who died as a result of lack of human touch and connection by a safe caregiver. As such, we believe, relationship is a biological imperative, a point not only supported by the scientific research, but also grounded in theological convictions: “God is friendship. The Father, Son and Spirit know and delight in one another…friendship is where you come from. And friendship is where you are headed” (Adam Neder, Friendship, 10/14/24). For students to flourish, students must learn, practice, and engage in relationships. It is ultimately through relationships that we are transformed and redeemed.
Psychological Flourishing
It is not a secret that mental health is at the forefront of health concerns. Often approaches target specific aspects of mental health, such as cognitive restructuring, emotional regulation, and mindfulness-based stress reduction, to name a few. At Whitworth, though the above may be practices students engage in, such practices will not, in the end, heal the human soul. We will not find ourselves in a mentally resilient state without engaging our bodies; we will not find rest for our anxious souls outside relationship with one another, our Creator, and the environment we inhabit. Mental resilience is a key ingredient for developing and living into restoring the communion and agency for which we are made. Our capacity to develop deep and meaningful relationships requires attunement, emotional mirroring, and bearing witness to our personal and collective stories. Psychological fortitude propels us towards agency, to move in the world as healers, restoring and making right what has been made wrong. Psychological health requires habitually regulating our emotions, making sense of our cognitions of self and others, and learning to engage with and relate to others through the existential challenges of human life. In other words, we need regular liturgies to shape us toward the telos of loving God, others, and ourselves.
Having covered the biopsychosocial aspects of human flourishing in Unit I, we next step back and ask a set of larger questions about the flourishing life—what is it all for? What larger story shapes the trajectory of my education, vocation, and life as a whole?
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Miraslov Volf and colleagues start their book Life Worth Living with a set of questions: “What matters most? What is a good life? What is the shape of flourishing life? What kind of life is worthy of our humanity? What is true life? What is right and true and good? . . . The Question is about worth, value, good and bad and evil, meaning, purpose, final aims and ends, beauty, truth, justice, what we owe one another, what the world is and who we are and how we live. It is about the success of our lives or their failure” (p. xv). The second unit… is aimed at engaging precisely such questions. In other words, having focused on the biopsychosocial aspects of flourishing in Unit I—aspects of flourishing that any human qua human would need to consider—in this second unit we step back and ask the teleological question: what is it all for? What is the larger vision of life, the anthropology, the ethics, the governing story that gives directionality to flourishing, that presses me evaluate whether the flourishing I think I am living or living toward living really is flourishing?
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I am confident that the life-giving content of the course, Introduction to a Flourishing Life, will be significant and impactful for our students and for the Whitworth of the future.
As someone who has dreamed of creating a course like this at my previous institution, I shout for joy every time I see a flourishing or well-being initiative happen, whether it’s a new center or something else, but especially in the academic disciplines. Preventative health habits are the key to flourishing, and society has allowed us to focus so much on the physical, perhaps to the detriment of the other dimensions of wellness. Thank you for sharing the on-going work of another institution fighting for the flourishing of our emerging generations and accomplishing it through interdisciplinary activities.