"The Art & Science of Human Flourishing: Living Well in the Face of Suffering, Loss, and Burnout"
By invitation only.
What makes for a flourishing life? How do we live well in the midst of all life throws at us? Loss of agency, hope, meaning and purpose, as well as our own mortality can all impede our experience of happiness and wholeness, making flourishing seem unattainable or fleeting.
What does science tell us are keys to flourishing? How does art illuminate our struggle for and capacity to achieve it?
In this colloquium we explore these questions through the frameworks and insights of scientific inquiry and artistic expression, as well as through participants' disciplinary perspectives and personal outlooks.
Our colloquium conversation centers around two projects:
The first features the work of Yale Professor of Medicine Ben Doolittle. Prof. Doolittle and his collaborators have conducted more than 200 interviews from around the globe with people who describe their lives as flourishing. What emerges is a hopeful vision of human thriving that bridges philosophy, theology, and lived experience.
The second highlights art's unique capacity to embody and interrogate human experience, providing another source of insight for our pursuit of flourishing, and features a work of art from the Keiskamma Art Project (South Africa) that responds to the AIDS crisis and makes barriers to this pursuit visible, while also holding forth a vision of hope.
Presenter Bios
Benjamin R. Doolittle, MD, MDIV is a professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine, and a professor of religion and health at the Yale Divinity School. He directs Yale's Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion, as well as the Combined Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program. Along with Professor Mark Heim, he is the co-author of the forthcoming book Theology and Medicine in Conversation: How the Healing Happens (Bloomsbury). He employs mixed-methods research strategies to investigate human flourishing, burnout, and the intersection of religion and science. Pastor Ben is also the minister of Pilgrim Congregational Church in New Haven, CT.
Tanya Walker, PhD is co-director of the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts (Rivendell Institute at Yale), overseeing initiatives which facilitate research and collaboration in the areas of literature and religion, and death and the arts. A member of the Association for the Study of Death and Society, her cross-disciplinary methodology is informed by examining the explicit and implicit frameworks through which the human experience is interpreted and expressed, with a specific emphasis on understandings of death in visual art and memorials. She periodically teaches "Continuing Bonds with the Dead through Art" at Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School.