Human Flourishing Book Launch

There will be a book launch of Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times on Tuesday 26 October 2021 at
St Anne's College, Oxford, in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre, 5:30pm to 7:00pm.

Human Flourishing is written by Andrew Briggs, Professorial Fellow of St Anne’s, and Michael J. Reiss, Professor at the London Institute of Education.

Attendance is free, but please register at the following:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-human-flourishing-andrew-briggs-tickets-177843313137

Comments from the authors ...

Can there be a bigger topic than human flourishing? Almost everyone cares about human flourishing, whether or not they use that term. Family roles, not only as spouse or parent, should be about promoting flourishing. Many professions, whether as teacher, pastor, solicitor, or doctor, are explicitly about promoting flourishing, and at their best so is every other way of earning a living and contributing to society through voluntary or employed service. Humans have been thinking about what it means to be human probably before writing was invented, and certainly ever since, whether it is Aristotle writing about εὐδαιμονία or the Psalmist asking God, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him?’.

In our book Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times, published by Oxford University Press on 18 October 2021, we identify three dimensions of flourishing: the material, the relational, and the transcendent. We further show how these dimensions, though distinct, are also interconnected, including in relation to questions about contemporary science and technology. And yet the deeper one digs to find foundational principles, the more the questions converge. What does it mean for people to be fully human? How can humans best behave responsibly? If that is true of the disparate technological changes, it is also true of other changes which impact human flourishing. They too prompt us to ask afresh what humans are for, and how human flourishing is to be promoted through the best of scientific insight and spiritual wisdom.