The Good Life Beyond "The Real World"

Some further thoughts on my essay for The Raised Hand

Yesterday morning The Raised Hand kicked off its second year-long conversation with my answer to the question, “What has the university to do with the good life?”

A monthly Substack newsletter orchestrated by Christian study center leaders like editor Dan Hummel (of the Upper House in Madison, WI), The Raised Hand seeks

to host a larger conversation, one that raises questions, prompted by our unique vantage point on higher education. These questions, each of which will be the focus for an entire academic year, are ones that either are not being asked or are being answered in ways that need deeper scrutiny.

We recognize the questions we raise are complex, with no easy answers. We seek to begin discussions, not to settle arguments. Nevertheless, our goals are clear: to help form people holistically, to shape thought on academic and societal topics through a Christian lens, and to advocate for a pluralistic ethos in higher education that makes room for Christian thought alongside other traditions.

Last year’s conversation (“What is education?”) began with an essay by no less a scholar than the eminent religious historian George Marsden, so you can imagine how honored I was to be asked to initiate this year’s discussion of “how higher education contributes to human flourishing, happiness, and a better world—in a phrase, the good life.”

It’s a good question precisely because it allows for a wide diversity of responses. I can imagine subsequent essays reflecting on moral formation, virtue ethics, Christian discipleship, democratic citizenship, etc. But I decided to come at the topic from a different direction, by challenging the assumption — common to American higher ed, to the extent that it thinks about such things — that “the good life” is one lived out in “the real world.”

…I do believe that the good life is an active life, and universities should prepare students to apply their minds to the material flourishing of economies, polities, societies, and communities.

But the good life is also a contemplative life, in which we not only think critically about our participation in such systems, but ponder other dimensions of existence.

Like action, contemplation requires certain skills, knowledge, and virtues, and the time and space in which to hone them. So it’s essential that the university continue to prepare students to live that aspect of the good life, through the seemingly impractical study of three worlds that are no less real for being intangible, invisible, and even ineffable.

Those three worlds being the bygone world of the past, the world that’s seen through artistic imagination or scientific theory, and the spiritual world.

Mostly, I want to send you to The Raised Hand to read my full essay and offer a comment there. While you’re at it, go ahead and sign up a free subscription, so that you don’t miss any of the other essays scheduled for 2023-24.

But after finishing the actual essay, let me invite paid subscribers to come back here to The Pietist Schoolman and read some further thoughts below — both explaining why I took the tack I did and expanding a bit on my original argument.