Pursuing a Life Worth Living

[Music] thanks so much Campbell and on behalf of all of us at the Trinity Forum welcome to today's online conversation with mirav Vol on pursuing a life worth living we're delighted that so many of you well over 2,000 of you have registered for today's online conversation to particularly welcome our first time registrants I think we have well over 150 of you as well as our International visitors and we have nearly 200 of you joining us from at least 32 countries that we know of ranging from Fiji and France to the UAE and Uganda so welcome from across the miles and across the time zones if you are one of those firsttime registrants or are otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum we work to cultivate curate and disseminate the best of Christian thought leadership and provide a space where leaders can wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith and come to better know the author of the answers we hope today's conversation will be a small taste of that for you today our guest today is a theologian and Scholar who has devoted his life to wrestling with those very big questions of Life namely what is a good person and what is the good life what is right and good and true and what does that mean for how each of us orders our time our attention and our priorities in short what does it mean to pursue a life worth living now these can seem like esoteric even unanswerable questions but our guest today argues that pursuing them is immensely practical even unavoidable and he offers in his newest book a guide to Aid the uncertain quester or Pilgrim in recognizing and assessing the paths offered by different philosophies faiths and tradition and to better equip them in answering the question we all must face how are we to live Miroslav Vol is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and culture and a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School he has written or edited more than a dozen different books including exclusion and embrace which was awarded the G award in religion and was named one of Christianity today's 100 most important religious books of the 20th century he's also developed and teaches is the most popular Humanities course at Al University entitled life worth living which is now taught well beyond Yale including in a federal prison and which forms the basis of his new and excellent work co-authored with his fellow lecturers Matthew Crossman and Ryan mcell Linds life worth living a guide to what matters most which we've invited him here today to discuss Miroslav welcome oh it's so great to be with you here and with the audience yes it's great to have you here so when we start out I love to sort of begin with the story behind the story and I'm very curious uh about yours and not only what led you to sort of study this um and write this book but essentially how did your life Pursuit become the study of a life worth pursuing oh that's such a such a wonderful question um thank you for and you know I'm one of those people who uh at 16 knew what my calling will be and there is not a single day that I regretted pursuing it as you can tell I am now 67 years old so so it's it's a wonderful thing but I think it's a wonderful thing for me because I think that is really the fundamental question of Our Lives that accompanies us uh across the journey uh in our life and for me it uh it was a question that I discovered early on you know I was a a child a son of a Pentecostal Minister and uh I always start living in former Yugoslavia this is an communist country that this was a kind of a crazy job that my father has inflicted upon me and that it's a burden with which I have to live so I quietly and openly openly rebelled un until until when I was about 16 uh and I was trying to both kind of push back against my father and my upbringing but at the same time I couldn't find myself pushing against the the the call of the person who was at the center of my father's life which was Jesus Christ and uh I embraced Faith uh of uh as my own and from then on this was the the question this was my question but interestingly enough you know this was a question of my colleagues uh of my fellow students uh because they always wanted to know what what happened to you uh you know I I I I kind of uh unlike today I I dressed well you know and people knew me in the entire school I was as popular kid in the school and suddenly they they think I'm associated with this religion thing and that was in a challenge for me and I think that turned me in in a way into a theologian even before I ever articulated that word for me I wanted to explain what motivates what gives depth what takes us to a place where our Humanity can be discovered as something beautiful uh and make sure that people understand that that's what I found in faith and that's what I wanted to for to share with those who um who are interested and in order to share to explore hence my career yeah so you're teaching this class at Yale and um you know Yale and other IBS too in many ways have sort of exemplified the trend of liberal arts one at least one time liberal arts colleg is moving away from really grappling with the big questions or teach teaching about character and character formation and wrestling with questions of the good life um but your course is the most popular Humanities course at Yale even though uh it's very explicit about the fact that each of us have more has a moral responsibility to to answer these questions and I would love to ask you more like how have you gone about teaching it because you're you're coming at this as a person of Orthodox Christian faith but you're teaching teaching it in a pluralistic way and and how has it been received by uh the very diverse student body there yeah I think that that was really really key difficulty which we are facing and I think that's part of the reason why those big questions uh of Life have not have kind of receded in importance there are many reasons why that has happened but one of them is that um we have increasingly become as a nation but also as universities very uh pluralistic now if you have a commitment to a kind of single truth and want to teach that at the pluralistic University you immediately bump up against the kind of a little rebellions that didn't seem to be quite appropriate and you know I teach at a pluralistic University I have to honor my students convictions and and beliefs um and also honor them as I teach and so the key the question was then how how does one teach a course uh in which one talks about varieties of ways in which our life as a whole is claimed and tries to articulate the truth of our life our existence but do it in a pluralistic way and the way in which we have done that is to engage what we do is probably maybe six or seven major Traditions they're religious uh or they can be secular as well but of each of these traditions in each of as we teach each of these traditions we make an assumption and share that assumption with students each of these Traditions claims to be true and if it claims to be true when it talks about human life it talks about your life and it talks about my life it asks me and you to do something about it to either agree or disagree uh and imagine ourselves take serious take it seriously imagine ourselves as inhabiting that world and that's how I started teaching it the course students are quite interested uh in that they don't have problems with plurality uh and I don't think it turned out that they don't have any problem of imagining themselves for two weeks that we take one tradition inhabiting that tradition taking seriously its truth claims and uh you know we have students from different backgrounds so with different uations in the class often it's a seminar they talk to one another and it's the the conversations are are alive uh and you can see them intellectually engage but you can see them also existentially engage and for me when that happens in the classroom I am the happiest of all teachers no I want to dig into the the substance of your of your work and your um your argument before that I am curious because I I mentioned in the introduction you um your course is now taught not just at Yale but also in a federal penitentiary uh and your your co-authors lead a lot of that teaching the questions that are kind of grappled with among the students at Danbury Correctional uh Institute how does that compare with the approach and the questions of of the students at Yale yeah I should I should say that it isn't continuously taught it has been taught and we hope to teach it uh teach it again but currently not taught but in any case that's besides your question is right uh right on the on the spot and you know if you have a present Community you have folks who have a little bit of time to think uh and to think back upon their lives and they all see the kind of a sense in which life hasn't gone right for them in whatever ways you can articulate this and sometimes I I think that we need need to come in a position where we have a sense that something isn't quite right with us to be able to open ourselves and to search for something with a kind of intensity and seriousness I often think that the way in which we live our lives is almost and and if things go smoothly in particular is almost distraction from taking seriously fundamental questions of life people ask me uh and and I'll return back to danber uh people people ask me oh isn't this course for kind of middle class people who have enough time to uh to think about questions of how we should live uh and I respond to them no no no middle class people are are most distracted and uninterested in that because their lives kind of go relatively relatively smoothly where that uh where these questions have first formulated uh in many centuries ago were by people who lived in a in impoverished circumstances compared to compared to us and that's what one finds also then in the Danbury uh um um prison because you find people who want to Grapple because life hasn't set well with them and that seriousness is really uh refreshing um and I think I find also that students today can also do that we need to kind of leave them into it but often they come to our class because in some ways uh either they're not managing to cope as well as they think they ought to ATL or maybe they think uh oh I've been striving since my kindergarten to uh get into Yale I'm now there why have I done all these things where am I who am I what is my life supposed to be and these great questions are um are are are heart of our our being as human and we need to pursue them with seriousness and they do yeah before one gets to the point where one really grapples with some of those questions it's um it's probably fairly common just to sort of default to an assumption that um you know if we grapple with it at all that uh the good life is um long healthy wealthy and happy um and you know if one had to pick uh you know probably the star among that litany would be happiness you know I I think that's probably a fairly common assumption that the good life is the happy life but right at the very outset of your work you question that assumption um whether happiness is really the the sum of flourishing and would love to sort of ask you about what you see as um as the difference or at least questions to ask uh about um well the the Deep differences or the the differences between um personal happiness and um and the good life and flourishing yeah it's a great question especially if one understands happiness not in a kind of deeper sense of that that term a kind of a life that that that that is has its own Integrity uh and happiness is understood as as basically pleasurable life uh things are going smoothly I feel okay uh I'm I'm uh Happy meaning there's a certain kind of lightness in my in my step the feet they tell you whether somebody's happy or not right um if one understands it that way and if you're if one is a Christian uh now what happens when you read the gospels was Jesus happy and we find him relatively rarely laughing smiling um we find him rather serious serious about uh his his mission uh um and it doesn't end particularly well and it then it ends uh relatively early for him very early 30s when he when he dies now was he just a martyr so that we can walk around with happy steps and and dance or might his life be paradigmatic in many ways of our own lives and once you start asking this question you realize that happiness might be too flighty too light um too much to be to blow around in the wind as it comes and never never quite stable to carry us um and you realize that there's things that are much more important you should love your God with all of your heart with all of your mind with all of your soul you should love your neighbor as yourself right well I mean this is the life of fullness this is the life of of weight not the flighty life but arduous life but arduous uh life that is in fact truly happy life and I think that little bit of self-introspection and also observing other people who we admire we in the book we name Martin Luther King well a short life uh so long life would you rather Martin Luther King or or live a long life well think about it or happy life uh Abraham Lincoln depressed but amazing uh as a presentent or achievement and so you can go down the line and see people who we admire a great deal who have not lived the way we imagin happiness to be you know in your book you give um what I thought was a really interesting formulation of what you call the three food groups of a good life and you describe those as agency or the question how should we live circumstance or what should we hope for and affect how does the good life feel and you talk about how our different uh conceptions of uh those food groups as well as our different combinations of them will lead us down different paths and so I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about what you mean by those three food groups and how we come to better understand them both alone and in combination yeah I think it's very important to understand each on its own and each in combination and all of them in combination because some people think of them uh as uh as a kind of completely independent things I they kind of bleed into into one another so so it's very uh very simple actually uh components of a good life uh in order to live a good life life uh I have to act in a certain way um the certain kinds of circumstances need to uh I need to be placed in certain kinds of circumstances uh I'm not a plant but like a plant I need a soil in which my particular kind of bodiliness can Thrive and it can develop in my own set of set of characteristics as a human being can can do uh so we need set of circumstances and we also uh need a certain uh nurtur the certain accompanying set of emotions and feelings in regard to that so I'm active I am passive because I receive something from the environment and I am something between active and passive when I feel um and now we can take each one of them and ask the question well what what what does it mean to act rightly in the word what kind of circumstances do I need to be truly uh Happ to have a happy life and what kinds of emotions are appropriate for me uh as a one who in life thrives and obviously a lot of discussion can uh can be had about about this for instance maybe most interesting and and most surprising to people is if you take uh kinds of emotions what kind of emotion emotions should accompany good life You' say good emotions and then you just go on that's the end of the question then end of the answer to the to the question And yet when you just look a little bit under the surface you see how those emotions can can differ there's a there's a great difference between pleasure for instance simple pleasure which is how a lot of people think uh about the good life and something like Serenity and contentment uh Pleasures are kind of a little bit screaming at you they're kind of boisterous alive uh uh contentment is a kind of quiet and stays there over periods of time and there's a good question of what do we do we need both how do we have both how do we put them together or if you think about something like Joy now I can take something like uh pleasure pill I can chemically produce pleasure but I can't take a joy pill because Joy is a feeling good about about something good and so it unites if you want both the uh feelings emotion that invites both feelings and circumstances of life um and so so as you see you you can you can part this out and then you can ask as you uh gestured to in your question also how do they fit together H how do they form this unit um because I I like to think them as a good life stool uh but the three legs are not kind of Simply independent they kind of bleed into one another you can see it with joy right Joys good feelings about something good well something good can be either my good agency or it can be circumstances of my or somebody else's life uh and uh attending to all three of those is great for for those in the audience who are who are Christians and who know their Bible it it derives from what Apostle Paul says when he defines what the kingdom of God is he says kingdom of God is not food and drink kingdom of God is righteousness peace and joy joy in the Holy Spirit uh righteousness is Right living peace is a kind of Shalom a set of circumstances of our our lives and joy is the crowning emotion of Christian Life you know any conception of the good life um you however one kind of shuffles the recipe has to Grapple with what uh we as Christians call Sin um and what in your book you had a chapter that which was uh wonderfully titled when we inevitably botch it so whether one calls it a botch or sin or um falsehood foibles uh moral failure is something that has to be has to be grappled with and your treatment of that I thought was fascinating you pointed out that um being wrong can feel like being right unless we know that we are doing wrong and so there's actually a builtin incentives for self-deception because being right feels better than being wrong um and you also talked about the fact that there's there are there are different paths and they lead us to along very different routes and but there's actually a fair amount of convergence among a lot of different traditions in dealing with sin um perhaps except for nii who essentially was in the camp of deny deny sin counter accusations you know essentially a to admit failure was a failure of nerve and it seems like we are actually in a nian moment right now where um that kind of approach is often sort of valorized and certainly there's a lot of incentives for it uh how do you make the difficult case to students that actually it is good um to acknowledge wrongdoing and to turn from it um what we in the Christian tradition would call repentance when it doesn't feel good and often there's a price to pay yeah it's a it's a great question I think today especially in today's environment this is um we have a problem we have a problem with with with kind of truthfulness about our own lives I don't think the problem is that we don't feel and see that we have done something wrong I think that we think that it's too costly as you I think indicated also that it's too costly to admit it and that we will be in the end better off if we don't whatever we do with the with with the actual thing that we have done but in terms of how we appear uh before other people uh we we are better off not not admitting and I think that's partly connected with with kind of unforgiving character and nature of our culture as well the two go together you know if you know that you're going to face unforgiveness uh you're going to hide uh and present yourself in the best possible light um and this unforgiving character of the culture I think is connected with uh in part with a with a kind of narrative conception of the self by which I mean we think of the self as kind of some of our what we have done and what others have done to us and how we have reacted to what we have done and others have done to us and that's kind of gross that's me right those what has happened but then if I how do I peel off something bad how do I separate myself from something bad so that I can be relieved of the burden of that being a me because that's what forgiveness is forgiveness is you know there's a deed that sticks to me but I take or God takes in Christian terms God takes that deed and peels it off and suddenly I'm freed from the guilt for that deed it almost is a is a invitation to the transformation of the entire self when that happens and and it's it's this way of thinking about the self that it's very difficult for PE people to um to accept though I must say I've written quite a bit on on forgiveness no matter what the audience I received the there's best reception of the topic of forgiveness than of any other topic on which I ever speak because people are hungry for their lives to be forgiven for they themselves to be affirmed not withstanding what they might have or have actually done and it's beautiful to see that and from my perspective as a Christian Christian Theologian I think that's a that's an incredible power of the Gospel in the sense that it it allows us find it provides us a way to think how do you separate the deed from the doer how do you condemn the deed but actually embrace the doer how do you condemn the deed so that you can embrace the doer and so the doer can Embrace themselves in the true sense of the word it's it's it's absolutely beautiful thing and students react well to that you know in addition to the the challenge of sin is also the challenge of suffering um and we're only we only have time to I know just skim the surface of this but would be really interested in your thoughts for what makes for a good life in the midst of suffering yeah suffering is a is a great challenge to to life to goodness of life for many people to goodness of God suffering can either make us cynical divert us from any seriousness about actually crafting our life and leading it well because it's all pointless anything can happen to anyone at any time um the the the the life is not worth living as many would say in the light of suffering on the other hand suffering can be a space the point where this tender plant of faith can grow and emerge um in my own life my own biography my father has found faith in on the death march uh after um months of U rage against God God and against God's world um my parents lives my mother's lives have been um full of suffering in many ways and yet the lives that they have led have been I think extraordinary they were able in those kinds of settings to think of the not simply of the pain that they experienced but also of the beauty of the response to that faith and that made [Music] them for me example examples of what it means to live a beautiful life when everything is falling apart and I think that's one of the one of the um benefits that uh religious traditions and I can think of Buddhism in in its own way I can speak especially of the Christian faith which uh which I embrace the the Christian faith has it its core a person who suffered innocently um and the reflection of what it means that nothing can separate us from God's love I think to me is some of the most beautiful of New Testament uh writing you know we there's so many more questions I'd to ask you we're rapidly running out of time where it's time to turn it over to the audience questions but one last one I would love to get your thoughts on you are very clear in in your work about how you know different paths do Lead You In do lead one in very different directions um the nonattachment and disengagement of Buddhism brings one to a very different place than the Christian injunction to love uh love God with all your heart mind soul and strength and love your neighbor but one area of convergence is that it seems like most Traditions say that actually we should not just think we need to act and that um living well does require acting well and so I'd love to hear from you about how your immersion into these questions and these studies uh in teaching this class has affected how you live um what if anything do you do differently as as a result of pondering these questions you that's that's a really wonderful question and I'd have to think a little bit uh to kind of Trace uh uh the changes in learning in terms of uh what um uh what the engagement with those uh traditions and uh and in my actually entire work as a as a theologian so so it's it's almost for me for me theology doing theology and kind of living were never two separate things they I always experienced them in the topics that I chose that I wrote uh about they were they were always tied to to life I I I have to have that I have to have an existential question and uh then I could write uh and be be happy in in writing and you know I've experienced in for instance with my book exclusion and in um you know it was written not just observing the the conflict and inability to resolve but also living in conflicts uh I was implicated uh uh in that and I often find myself uh in some situation in some conflict and then then I hear the voice but you argued in your book so so so kind of my book was wag wagging a finger against me I myself was wagging finger ER against me right and in some ways that is really what the study proper study of the Bible does for us proper study of other spiritual uh Traditions does for us it reminds us uh and and calls us back to ourselves to our commitment um and I think I can find that in uh in many many other Traditions I've been involved in many years in in um Muslim Christian dialogue um and that there there are extraordinarily Riches of wisdom in uh the spiritual tradition that are is associated with with Islam the there are twistings of it just like there are twistings of the Christian uh tradition and even when I can't quite go along the way and follow I can I can certainly uh learn uh I remember conversation I'll tell you conversation I remember with my with my friend Prince gazi of Jordan and my mother was still alive and she was visiting me and gazi called me and we started talking about I don't know somebody who has you know to whom God spoke I I gave him there's a friend of ours who and I told him you know what you know this guy told me that God he was at a place and God spoke to him and then he starts talking about well you know in our tradition we have a we have a criteria for discernment how do we know that it is God speaking rather than uh rather than just my feeling certain way and having certain predilections and I said well yeah yeah right right same thing in in our tradition we have a we we we have even Apostle Paul speaks about gift of discernment right so so you have to have a special kind of attentiveness in order to discern and you can just take it so we're going back and forth and my mother is sitting there and listening to us and I and she's a she's a mean my my father was a Pentecostal Minister she she was a Pentecostal uh all of her life very devout and she she says to me you know what Mir this gazi guy he's good for you he's taking you into places uh you know not away from deepening your faith but actually into it and that's how I experienced often engagement with uh with various Traditions kind of deepening and seeing in my tradition something that I might not see otherwise that's fantastic but we're going to turn to questions from some of our viewers and I see there's quite a few so the first one comes from Chuck Olen and Chuck ask in your class do you share that you understand the claims of the Christian tradition to be the truth and if so how does that impact the Dynamics of the class interaction oh yes we do we we um we invite all the students uh it's generally it's a seminar multiple seminars that we have always everybody on the first that's that's what happens in the first session uh everybody describes their own traditions where where they come from and when I speak about uh this when my colleagues speak one of them is uh ordained mat Crossman is ordained as well and and be be safe you know the these are my convictions that's where I come from uh I'm an even ordained minister um and that's that uh my goal here is not necessarily to persuade you my goal in this class is to be uh an impartial guide in order to help you understand ask proper questions struggle with them be honest in asking those those questions and my purpose is to guide you through those uh questions and I think that's how we approach it so that everybody knows the kinds of claims that Jesus Christ has Upon Our Lives uh but at the same time just as such out of responsibility to Christ to lead another person on their own search yeah for A Life That's great so don Morgan asked how might churches use your book or what is some of the ways that you've heard that they've used it yeah uh it was we were surprised because it wasn't written for the for the churches two ways uh that uh that we have heard uh and we'll try to provide resources for that uh as well one way was somebody somebody says you know Mira why don't you have two minute three minute videos on each of your chapters and I'm going to preach then a sermon from the Christian standpoint on the on the question that you've raised and I think that this is really great idea because what we are trying to do in the book to raise a set of interconnected questions that can lead a person to take seriously the entirety broad spectrum of what it is to me live a good life life to be good the other way U and a minister in San Francisco has uh has done that in a lot fairly large Church um basically he uses the book as um to invite people who are completely unchurched and not particularly interested in Christian faith or might have suspicions about it here's what we are about in many ways this book names the issues that we want to attend we have a particular perspective from which we address them but engage this book and see whether existentially it speaks to you and whether you're interested to explore these questions and then we can see where it goes That's great so a question from Mitchell Temple who asked how might you connect Jesus Declaration of the Abundant Life life to human flourishing yes in John there's a kind of abundant notion of Abundant Life you know it's it's a there's an exegetical question of how to interpret Abundant Life you can interpret it as um life of abundance that is to say having a a great deal of yes interesting good uh stuff High qual whatever you want to say uh abundance but but you can also interpret it and that's how I interpret it abundance of life so so so to say abundance of livel kind of insuppressible liveliness no matter what the circumstances and I Think Jesus is speaking about the second uh option right so it doesn't mean that uh uh circumstances of Life need to be bad after all when you look look at the images of New Jerusalem it's it's a it's portrayed as if it is the most glorious of Glorious uh cities and environments right but I I think we have to account that the same Jesus who said it in chapter 10 in chapter 14 goes on to speak repeatedly when he leaves they will be persecuted uh life will not be abundance of goods for them it will the abundance of liveliness and insuppressible unextinguishable liveliness that's great so an interesting question from rjan overwater and rjan asked what makes a good life together how do we become joyful in community and how do we atone for the wrongs embedded in the culture and community that we're a part of I think that's a very very important uh question assumption is that life live properly rightly is a life lived uh together and I think that kind of sense that we are the the good life isn't something that happens to us individually as either as bodies or as simply Souls but life that is good happens in interconnection that we have with our communities communities of Faith but also broader uh communities um I think it's it's quite right what Martin Luther King has has said I either flourish together with everyone else or I don't flourish this is my paraphrase it's probably not what he said but something to the effect he did I remember um but I believe that's that's that's really right and that's why uh you have a a kind of um a Christian hope is for a GL Global transformation and salvation not simply uh flight of a soul to the some Heavenly realm um yeah yeah so so many good questions are are coming in um Yuki Whitley ask what are your thoughts on the social dimension of how Christians may leave a good life in a pluralistic society how to gracefully balance between the poles of being socially withdrawn and insular on one hand versus being of the world and relinquishing any distinction between what is good or true versus false and evil I don't think we should uh relinquish anything like um distinction between what is good and true and false and evil I think that would be a radical mistake I think my my sense is um we need to ask the question how do we speak the truth in love how do we make the distinction and bring to bear the distinction in the realm where profound disagreements are what would it mean as a part of loving another person to honor everyone one of the shortest commands in the New Testament is honor everyone now that's very interesting and I think it would take us a long ways if we would just obey this shortest of I think almost shortest of all new test how can how can you have a short no you can say look right so so you can have a one-word commands but it's a two-word command um and I find that find it very very enlighting I think we we fail when we don't honor we fail when we don't love we fail when when we don't seek to seek to embrace we don't fail when we say what we think the truth we don't fail when we say what we think is good uh it it's the way we do it and and in the Christian faith you can separate the what from the h if I am to love my neighbor I have to love my neighbor in a loving way otherwise I undermine the very command uh and the thing that I'm trying to uh to achieve so Dan Bower uh submits a question wanting to follow up on the discussion of suffering and he asked how do people in situations of long-term crisis like refugees those in prolonged Civil War chronic poverty experience flourishing in your observation well I'll tell you how I experienced it um I'm not necessarily suggesting this is what we certainly this is I I'm not suggesting at all that this is what we should all do and that this is the best one can do and this is all one needs to do but I was raised by a very saintly woman whose husband was killed in the second world war she was alone and the sole Christian Protestant Christian among the her entire family my parents had two rooms in the kitchen and she had none they invited her to be uh to live with us and then she became my nanny as my mother was uh working and my father too I have never seen at least from my perspective uh I I saw her when I was when I was very young I have never seen a person that is more marked by goodness more joyous than Teta militza it a short four and a half feet tall woman Babushka with little mustache and a wart on her uh on over her uh um over on her lip over her lip and I thought she was most beautiful woman because she was she radiated that kind of beauty now I'm I'm I'm naming her as something that is possible uh at the same time I I think those who live in ungodly circumstances as refugees and um um victims of war or um I think of Gaza right now Ukraine right now uh they need Shalom they need circumstances that would let them thrive in more ways than T milit was able to thrive but don't nonetheless she was absolutely beautiful in that a question from Elizabeth Yang who asked as a theologian how or do you integrate scientist ific or M the scientific or materialist Dimension into your work such as the scientific definition or understanding of emotions circumstances and agency um so I think Sciences are are are kind of some of the coolest things on the planet because they you know varieties mean it's incredible what they open up uh for us but one of the questions that they cannot answer is what should I want what kind of person should I be they can analyze uh what I want they can analyze what I should that I uh want that is that can what I think that I should want but they cannot tell me they their job is to describe what is going on in the world they can help me with means toward ends but they really cannot set human ends that's my conviction and this is no way to diss The Sciences it is simply to describe their own self- understanding and whoever then on the basic of scientific descriptions makes accounts or crafts accounts of the life that is ought to be lived that how life ought to to go and what kind of emotion one has to have would know that they go beyond what Sciences themselves allow they're they're making moral uh purpose judgments that Sciences cannot uh cannot do and that's why I think that for instance um at there's a course psychology and the good life very popular course uh I know the the professor quite well um we are very on on very friendly friendly terms I think both of these courses should be taught together she's trying to help people on the basis psychology how to navigate life uh we are trying to she's trying to help people how to get from point A to point B we're trying to help people choose what the right kind of B is that they should be going to you know Betsy kodat raises a question that I've thought about asking you as well Betsy asked um how have students well have students given you feedback about how your cours has influenced their lives careers and interaction in society and I'll just sort of Ladle on to that the fact that you mentioned in the epilogue of your book that you frequently are visited by students who um share their concerns um about their realized propensity to make wrong decisions and even the potential for living an evil life and you often warn them about the even more likely danger of triviality but um would love to hear you talk about that but also Betsy's questions about what feedback have you gotten from students about how this has affected their lives longer term well the first feedback we got uh and that set us on the course was of teaching the class uh a long-term course of teaching the class uh was that PE students were hungry one student I remember uh said um you know uh until I came till I sat in your class I was never given permission to take with intellectual seriousness the questions of what makes for the good life and I thought my goodness this was the intellectual question that that that captured the imagination and uh which people pursued with intensity over centuries and she can be born in a situation where nobody gives her permission to do that this is crazy she has to come up with a life worth living for herself it's impossible right so so these would be some reactions the other reactions are also um you know I've received an email of a student I said you know you remember I don't know whether you remember me but I was in your class and then gives me the year and was and he gives me a little story house he's just gotten married and they have a dog and they're expecting also a family and you know and then I remembered your class um which is to say now he's at the juncture in life and ask what do I do with my my life how do I live it now especially if the child is uh on the way and they take go back to the course and uh look and uh try to figure out how to how to live uh you Sher asked about um kind of modes of failing uh in a sense uh in life and I think that obviously ways in which we can fail as human beings is it's just in spect spectacular failure we are really influential and we use that influence in some pernicious kinds of uh ways we can all think of cases of this sort but I think the great danger of Our Lives is that we get lost in trivialities it that we Fritter away uh the beauty of life and the weight of of life and live from moment to moment um chasing after one glitzy thing uh one glitzy thing after another uh one superficial task um after another and we end up empty-handed at the very at the very end what have I spent time it's it's almost like our life is a one one long uh kind of scrolling uh on on the phone right uh one interesting thing uh after another that each of them uh is Trivial and all of them together add to this burden of triviality and S sense of waste uh that have just happened um and I kind of knew it and didn't want to do anything about it and still kind of followed it because there is a certain captivity uh to it so so my sense would be that's that is too what what would we try to warn the students uh that's too what I start to try to warn myself away from uh every moment is precious and could be beautiful and beautiful with weight of consequence uh of beautifying the world and beautifying other people around us that's a great segue to a final question from Ed Savage who ask what role does awe and wonder play in The Good Life H yeah for me this is um this almost like at the foundation of everything because the goodness of life is not something that simply is there as something to pick up and uh if you want to do it if you you want and not discard but the goodness of life when you think about it is I kind of exper I experience it as a gift and if it's a gift it has some kind of a giver uh and if it has a giver it deserves gratitude and if we are grateful truly we would be in awe of what is what has been given and we would seek to have eyes to be able to be in awe and I find that um being in a is something that one has to nurture in oneself this da is crawling right and this daily the moments of triviality uh a fritters away and you almost don't have eyes to see what is so much more weighty and beautiful than ordinariness of every moment that is being frittered away so nurturing that sense of awe uh I think it's uh really fundamental that's great thank you Mir slav and just a moment I want to give you the last word but before that a few things to just to share with all of our viewers first right after we conclude we're going to be around a feedback form really welcome your thoughts um we we try to incorporate this we really value the input uh as a small thank you and token of appreciation uh if you fill out that feedback form we will give you a code for a free Trinity Forum reading download of your choice there are several that we would recommend that complement some of what we've been discussing here including Victor Frankle man search for meeting at Thomas aquinus on happiness Brave New World by Alis Huxley how much land does a man need by Tolstoy and wrestling with God by Simone vay so hope that you will do that secondly tomorrow right around noon we'll be sending out an email with um a link to today's online conversation which would' love for you to share with others we'll also have a list of different readings and resources if you want to use this conversation for small group use and want to go further uh into your reading or discussion of different opportuni and resources will be there for you third we would love to invite all of you who are watching to join the Trinity Forum society which is the community of people who help Advance the Trinity forum's Mission of cultivating curating and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good in addition to being part of the community there are a number of benefits to being a society member including a subscription to our quarterly Trinity Forum readings a subscription to our daily what we're reading list of curated reading recommendations and as a special incentive for those of you joining the society or with your gift of $100 or more we will send you a signed copy of Professor vul's excellent work life worth living so we hope that you will join us and that we can welcome you into the society if you'd like to sponsor a future online conversation let us know we'd love to talk with you uh and there should be an opportunity to do that in the feedback form as well in terms of events coming up in just a couple of weeks on February 23rd we'll be hosting Tim Alberta the author of the new book The Kingdom the power and the glory and we'll be hearing from Amy Julia Becker in early March uh other guests lined up for the year include Christian Wyman Philip yansy John Mark comr JN anzu Elizabeth Oldfield and more so there should be an opportunity to sign up and register for those um in the chat feature or on our website and hope to see you there you can also access all of our past online conversations on our website at tf. org finally as promised the last word goes to you Miroslav oh thank thank you so much you know we talked about the triviality uh and the danger of triviality and one of the things that uh informs the the book life worth living um in particular subtitle a guide to what matters most is the story uh Parable that Jesus tells of a merchant who saw a treasure and then sold everything he had in order to buy that treasure and I often ask myself a question I want to put that question before all of us what is the treasure for which you would be willing to sell everything that you have and if you know what the treasure is are you willing are we willing actually to risk everything to have enjoy that treasure thank you marav it's been great to talk with you excellent to talk to you and to your audience I love the questions thank you to all of you for joining us have a great weekend

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Length: 60min 30sec (3630 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024