The speakers in today’s forum engage with two main questions: What stories are you telling yourself? And how can you learn to tell better ones?
You’ll hear today from practicing psychiatrist Curt Thompson and Health Behavior and Health Education professor Victor Strecher (UMichigan). Curt and Vic discuss what it looks like to tell better stories, the role community plays in storytelling, and what difference the Christian story can make in our lives.
This forum was held at the University of Michigan in January of 2024 and was moderated by graduate student Annika From. Thank you to the Forum planning team at the University of Michigan for making this event possible.
The Bible talks an awful lot about trusting things as opposed to knowing things.
Nobody creates purpose all by themselves in an isolated chamber. ... It is something that [we] receive as part of being in community in the first place.
We live in a world that has, for 500 years, been training us to believe that we — each of us as individuals — should be able to come into the world and be masters of our universe without the help of anybody else. I should be able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps. And the reality is that human beings don't survive in that kind of context.
Socrates once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Aristotle essentially said, "Yes, that's right, Socrates, but the purposeless life isn't worth examining in the first place."
My brain can't figure out the question of flourishing by itself. I need the presence of other people in the room.
