Why Life Worth Living Exists

The Life Worth Living Program exists to revive critical discussion about these questions of lasting human significance. Through our courses at Yale College, a growing network of professors and institutions across higher education, pedagogical strategy and design, and public outreach for life-long learners, we aim to facilitate conversation across important and enduring lines of difference on questions of meaning and purpose.

The Life Worth Living program equips students, educators, and the public for the lifelong process of discerning, articulating, and pursuing the good life through engaging the world’s great philosophical and religious traditions. These core activities are supported by various media offerings and select textbook and popular publications. The program envisions a world where deep reflection on the good life is central to pluralistic undergraduate education and public discourse.

For Life-Long Learners

Educational resources to help you envision and live a flourishing life

Podcast

Speaking to the Unspeakable

How do you speak to the unspeakable? How does a people connected to place retain their sense of meaning and time when they are displaced and ignored? Indigenous Australian journalist and public intellectual Stan Grant (Monash University) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of his experience as an Aboriginal Australian, the son of Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay people in the Outback of New South Wales, Australia. He tells the story of his family’s Christian faith and Aboriginal identity—how the two work together. He shares the sense of aboriginal homelessness and displacement and his efforts to seek justice for Aboriginal people in modern Australia, a place with no memory. He teaches us the meaning of Yindyamarra Winhanganha—which is Wiradjuri concept meaning a life of respect, gentleness, speaking quietly and walking softly, in a world worth living in. He comments on declining democracy, how to live with dignity after catastrophe, what it means to be both nothing and everything—and we learn from Stan about the power of silence to speak to the unspeakable.

A reflected image of a red rock formation with translucent aboriginal cave art in the foreground.
People talking in a lecture hall
"I saw in my classmates, from Christian to Atheist to Muslim to Jew, from the agnostic middle to the free-will-denying scientists, a capacity for wonder, love, curiosity, deep reflection, argument, and serendipity."

Yale Student / Life Worth Living 2018

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