Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds That Came Before

Discover the Good Life as you learn from the wise voices of the past.

We've lost ourselves. Disconnected from the past and uncertain about the future, we are anxious about what our lives will be and troubled by a nagging sense of meaninglessness. Adrift in the world, many Christians have their identity completely wrapped up in work, and their definition of the "good life" is financial success. Fewer of are staying committed to the Christian faith, finding it difficult to reconcile their experience with their longings and desires. With so much uncertainty, where can we find a true vision of "the Good Life"?

Learning the Good Life speaks to this malaise with a curated collection of voices from the past, inviting Christians into an ages-old dialogue with some of history's wisest and most reflective minds. Featuring thought-provoking writings from a diverse lineup of over 35 writers and thinkers:

• From the classic—including Confucius, Augustine, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass;
• To the modern—including W.E.B. DuBois, Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Simone Weil;
• To the contemporary—including Wendell Berry, David Foster Wallace, and Marilynne Robinson.

Together these sages, writers, philosophers, and poets address important issues such as virtue, beauty, community, wonder, suffering, and meaning.

Each of these texts are introduced by experts from a variety of Christian colleges and universities to help provide a richer narrative in which Christians can participate. Each text is also accompanied by discussion questions to provoke further thought and contemplation and to facilitate discussion when used in groups.

Learning the Good Life is ideal for any Christian seeking a deeper connection to the wisdom of the past and wanting a more cohesive vision of the good life. Though not all these writers were themselves Christians, they all have a message for you. All of them are calling you to die to yourself, to your habits of indulgence, to your pride and ambition—and to dedicate your time to learning, thinking, and loving.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and the author of several books, most recently Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress. Her book Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year in Arts and Culture award, and The Scandal of Holiness received a 2022 Award of Merit. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Other awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague, an NEH to study Dante in Florence, a Biola University sabbatical fellowship funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and the 2017 Emerging Public Intellectual Award. She is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

Jacob Stratman is Dean of Humanities, Bible and Arts at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. His first book of poems, What I Have I Offer with Two Hands, is a part of the Poiema Poetry Series (Cascade Books).