God, the Good Life, and Pastoral Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-459
Author(s):  
Thomas (Tae Sung) Shin
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Pastoral Theology ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Triune God ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pastoral Practice

In this study, I emphasize that pastoral practice revitalizes the significance of spiritual life as an alternative way to negotiate the science of well-being. This article is written from the perspective of practical theology, which is framed as a way of “living well” in which it is doubtful for both the individual and community to fulfill the good life without spirituality. Such an approach entails a degree of a transformative and transcendent life created by new senses, attentions, knowledge, ontological understanding, and disciplines out of the experience of the triune God. This study responds to the vocation of practical theology according to Ruard Ganzevoort and Johan Roeland, who assert that, “In its focus on praxis, practical theology has evolved out of three historical different styles of theology with differing concepts of and methodological approaches toward praxis: pastoral theology, empirical theology, and public theology.” They suggest that pastoral practice should be something that contributes to the culture of well-being and that the roles of spiritual life in the formation and reformation of the good life should be clarified.

A Critique of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism: Morality and Politics

1996 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-364
Author(s):  
Bi‐Hwan Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Perfectionism

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.

Ecocritique and Anecdote

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-48
Author(s):  
Sean Cubitt
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Living Well ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Notion

Section 1 starts by considering the central notion of this book: a “ecocritique”. The ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well-being of the world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. It is all encompassing. Section 1 then considers how the term “anecdote” relates to ecocritique. Anecdotes provide a peculiarly powerful tool for finding out the meaning of living well, as well as the answering the oft-asked question: who is this “we”? The beauty of anecdotes is that they operate in a non-contemporaneous time. They operate equally well in the past, present, and future. A primary political and ecocritical task of anecdotal method, therefore, is to recognise this hybrid temporality, and to free and maintain its capacity to generate new futures and new pasts.

Positive Psychology: Past, Present, and Future

2009 ◽  
pp. 6-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Diener
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Functioning ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This chapter briefly reviews the history of positive psychology, and the endeavor by scientists to answer the classic question posed by philosophers: What is the good life? One piece of evidence for the growth of positive psychology is the proliferation of measures to assess concepts such as happiness, well-being, and virtue. The chapter briefly reviews the importance of C. R. Snyder to the field of positive psychology. Several critiques of positive psychology are discussed. One valid critique is that there is too much emphasis within positive psychology on the individual, and too little focus on positive societies, institutions, and situations. We can profit from considering the various critiques because they will help us to improve the field. Positive psychology has important strengths, such as the number of young scholars and practitioners who are entering the field. The Handbook of Positive Psychology is an outstanding resource for all those who are working in this discipline, and also for others outside of the area, to gain broad knowledge of the important developments that are occurring in our understanding of positive human functioning.

WRITING COLLABORATIVE HAPPINESS

2022 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Catherine Kingfisher
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Research Project ◽  
The Individual

Abstract In this article, I discuss a collaborative research project with two urban cohousing communities: Kankanmori, in Tokyo, and Quayside Village, in North Vancouver. The project focused on the joint production of the good life in the two communities, both of which situate well-being as simultaneously social and subjective, thus expanding beyond mainstream approaches to happiness narrowly focused on the individual. In what follows, I describe the particular forms that collaboration took over the course of the six-year project and then provide a brief overview of the positive contributions cohousing can make to social and environmental sustainability.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of the ‘good life’: eudaimonic well-being is associated with insular cortex volume

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 615-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary J. Lewis ◽  
Ryota Kanai ◽  
Geraint Rees ◽  
Timothy C. Bates
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Insular Cortex ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
The Good Life

An Analysis of Prudential Value

Utilitas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN M. CAMPBELL
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Relationship

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.

Toward the Pursuit of What People Value

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Mendiola Teng-Calleja ◽  
Jose Antonio R. Clemente ◽  
Ma. Ligaya Menguito ◽  
Donald Jay Bertulfo
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Living Wage ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Initial Attempt ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Research And Policy ◽  
The Capability Approach

Abstract. This study sought to initiate conversations on the utility of the capability approach and a psychological lens in approximating a living wage. We put forth the concept of capability gap – defined as the difference between what one values and what one perceives as attainable. We used a set of valued domains of a good life that were identified based on well-being indicators in determining capability gaps. Five hundred workers (all breadwinners) belonging to households selected through stratified random sampling from purposively chosen middle- and low-income communities in the Philippines participated in the survey. From the data, we constructed a weighted capability measure that determines the capability gap, weighted by the perceived importance of each of the good life domains. We likewise derived an estimate of a living wage that yields a weighted capability that represents individuals' capabilities to achieve and pursue valued outcomes, freedoms, and entitlements. This initial attempt at estimating a living wage based on individuals' capability to achieve and pursue a good life is presented as the main contribution of the research. The limitations of the study as well as its implications to living wage research and policy are discussed.

Living the Good Life?

Waste ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Financial Wealth ◽  
The Past ◽  
Affluent Society

With the ever increasing sense in the 1980s that Japan had arrived as an economic power, attention was newly focused on what beyond financial wealth and material abundance constituted an affluent life, on what constituted “true affluence” or an “affluence of the heart.” Affluence—and waste along with it—came to be conceived in more psychological, spiritual, and emotional terms than in the past, with an attention to a well-being and self-fulfillment which extended beyond the purely financial. What was often being sought was yutori, or leisure, relaxation, space, and unconstricted time. Financial and material prosperity made possible self-reflection about what a good life could and should be in an affluent society.

“The secret to happiness may be unhappiness”

Propelled ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Andreas Elpidorou
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Negative Experiences ◽  
Emotional Adaptation ◽  
Positive Experiences ◽  
Conception Of The Good

The chapter explores the nature of the good life, articulates the role that happiness, pleasure, and positive emotions play in such a life, and considers the effects of emotional adaptation and emotional diversity on our well-being. By drawing upon both philosophical literature and research in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, it argues for a broad conception of the good life, one that does not identify the good life simply with the presence of positive experiences and the absence of negative ones. The chapter shows not only that negative experiences aren’t detrimental to our well-being, but that they are often necessary to achieve it.

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