Renewing Christian intellectual life in the world's research universities
Disciplinary scholars provide initial reactions and questions to help shape the final Theology Brief.
Kyoto University
Volf, Croasman and McAnnally-Linz ask us to consider the essence of a ‘flourishing life’. For almost fifty years I have been preoccupied in teaching, research, writing and advocacy with the needs of people engulfed in disasters and how attitudes, policies and appropriate architecture can enable surv…
Yale University
Flourishing is a term not of theological but of vegetable origins: to flourish is, first of all, to bloom, blossom, flower. Perhaps the earthiness of this etymology can serve to counter the airiness of philosophical and theological abstraction. After all, the necessary precondition for flourishing i…
University of Notre Dame
I am grateful to Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz for their Flourishing Preview effort to get the ball rolling on this most important and complex subject, most especially for their recognition of human flourishing as a normative (hence teleological) ideal, and their emphases u…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My spirit was "strangely warmed" by this preview, a result that I confess much formal theology fails to provoke. Thank you. There is deep resonance here for me. One connection to my work in explaining science to a wider public is that I find often among both secular and religious communities an extr…
University of Oxford
In 2021 Oxford UP will publish Human Flourishing: Scientific insight and spiritual wisdom in uncertain times , by Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss. In the book, we identify three dimensions of flourishing as material, relational, and transcendent:
University of Alberta
I enjoyed reading Volf et al.’s thought-provoking brief. I must confess though that my initial reaction came with some reservations. I resonate with the Stoics’ idea of flourishing - virtuous living - but am (or was) inclined to be suspicious of tying flourishing too closely to circumstances (sounds…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My scholarship is on changes in the space enterprise and how to make it more broadly accessible and cost effective. It would primarily affect “life going well” in that when the space enterprise changes many more people overall at the world will be able to innovate in the new space enterprise. Like m…
AGH University of Science and Technology
Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord , and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its frui…
Yale University
I think the Flourishing preview is superb. I am surprised that, when I wrote Justice: Rights and Wrongs , I did not see that, in addition to the agential and circumstantial dimensions of flourishing, which I took note of, there is the emotional dimension. It now seems to me blindingly obvious.
Monash University
On flourishing in relation to topics I work on: How does the social contract, as metaphor and narrative, help to make visible and clarify the agential and circumstantial prerequisites of flourishing? How can it obscure those same prerequisites? (Christopher Watkin, French Philosophy Today: New Figur…
University of Calabar
Harnessing and managing the resources that promote flourishing cannot be totally separated from people’s ideas and worldviews. In this respect, how can cultivation of critical thinking address the socioeconomic disabilities that undermine the promotion of flourishing life in the global south?
University of Rosario
I read the Theology brief on human flourishing after visiting a family of indigenous healers in my country, Colombia – a family that has become my own. The Taita’s (shaman) grandchildren, 7 and 4 years old, were mourning the absence of their mother, who had to go away for a treatment. Instead of gri…
University of Melbourne
This is a provocative brief and I thank the authors for it. In particular, I appreciate the recognition of the dimension of the emotional plane. I note my reactions briefly below.
La Trobe University
I like the connection between “righteousness” and a flourishing life. The idea of “righteousness” has permeated my research on Hong Kong, from the inquiries of universal human rights, the motivations behind lawyers’ political activism, and the basis of public trust in courts. It takes on particular …
University of Otago
The Flourishing Preview connects with my research on sexual dignity. Framing sexual violence as an assault on dignity allows for exploration of all three dimensions of flourishing as impacted by rape – for example, agency is overruled by the aggressor’s disregard for consent; this moral wrong can re…
American Bar Foundation
I find most evocative the three-dimensional unpacking of “flourishing” in the sense of (1) its value for a more systematic theological and ethical approach to the scholarly frontiers on which I seek to work, and (2) for understanding aspects of the academic life, the academic practices and instituti…
Columbia University
This brief describes well how medicine has gone astray: "experts in means but amateurs in ends.” We doctors have come to focus far too much on patients feeling well, while ignoring both society’s responsibility in ameliorating adverse circumstances (see Bradley & Taylor’s The American Health Care Pa…
University of Toronto
I am a pediatric surgeon and a researcher. As a surgeon-scientist, I have not been thinking so much about “flourishing” as we live in our new pandemic reality. I am mostly focused on the treatment of and research into congenital disorders that impair breathing in newborns. In the process, I provide …
Harvard Medical School
I found the Flourishing preview helpful, and would like to ask, as a psychiatrist interested in the relief of emotional and existential distress, where would the authors locate a sense of meaning and purpose (an element in Tyler VanderWeele’s Flourishing Measure)? While clearly related to emotions, …
Harvard University School of Public Health
(1) While I would wholeheartedly agree with the statement that "setting the definition of flourishing cannot be a task for the empirical sciences", I think this also potentially misses the important role of the empirical sciences not only in understanding the means to flourishing, but also the actua…
Auckland University of Technology
Thanks to these authors for addressing such a core question of human life, and therefore also a central issue for Christian reflection. ‘What should life ideally be like?’ is a pivotal matter for consideration by all of us. I offer several thoughts in response:
University of Oxford
The three-part conception of flourishing (agential, circumstantial and emotional) is very helpful in reflecting on the approaches to human flourishing that are part of an ongoing discussion in economics and related disciplines. More specifically, the issue of ‘flourishing’ or ‘welfare’ has a long hi…
Brandeis University
This is an excellent and very helpful perspective on flourishing. Stating that the empirical sciences cannot take on the task of defining flourishing is crucial. Broadly speaking, economics allows that concept to be defined by the individual. However, economics can contribute to understanding the au…
University of Oxford
Many people, like myself, “get” things from metaphors and images. Flourishing bears the image of flower. The Bible sometimes talks of ripe corn and bearing fruit, but it oftentimes also talks about flourishing, regardless of fruit, from the flowers on the field that bloom today and tomorrow are gone…
Australian National University
My disciplinary area is armed conflict and largescale political violence, with a focus on prevention and protection of civilian populations. Flourishing is a concept that does not feature in this area of study, despite efforts among scholars in this field to advance global cooperation and standards …
University of Oxford
1. On politics and flourishing: I think the nearest general social surveys get to flourishing is ‘life satisfaction’, which is measured in social surveys, but not in political surveys. In the latter, we ask about satisfaction with democracy, but the measurement of all this is highly complex. We don’…
Victoria University of Wellington
Thank you to the authors for this brilliantly clear analysis of a Christian approach to human flourishing, which is surely the most fundamental question underlying everything we aspire to do in life, both personally and politically. There is little to disagree with in the analysis – that flourishing…
University of Technology Sydney
The schema would be recognizable by my economics colleagues as they reflect on their own experience, but it is not easily formalizable in one of their models. This is a criticism of economic models, rather than the framework.
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
My first impression of the Flourishing preview is one of awe as to its density and clarity. It provokes me to raise two cross-cultural hermeneutical questions about framing its thesis by using the specific language/text in the brief (theological, philosophical, and that of Marcus, Marx, Mond). First…
University of Otago
I welcome the clarification of the three dimensions of flourishing provided in the preview. Each is clearly important, not in isolation, as the preview makes clear, but in combination. The preview suggests all kinds of connections with wider biblical/theological themes. As suggested, for instance, b…
University of Edinburgh
The concern to identify a normative concept of flourishing is admirable. There could be more connection made between “flourishing” and the traditional theological discussions of beatitudo, usually rendered “happiness”, sometimes “blessedness”. Such a connection could have the effect of widening the …
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
In my work with victims of forced displacement due to violence in Colombia, the concept of “holistic human flourishing” serves as a key organizing principle. Our holistic focus has broken down the facets of human flourishing in spiritual, economic, social, political, pedagogical, and psychological t…
University of Oxford
This is an extremely clear and helpful approach to conceptualising flourishing as threefold – agential, circumstantial, emotional. For some years now the relationship between freedom and flourishing has been a particular research interest of mine and my thinking can be mapped onto this conceptualisa…
No preview responses in that discipline.
