On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life - Hardcover

Froese, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199948909 ISBN 13: 9780199948901

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

What is your purpose in life? This simple question motivates some of our most life-altering decisions, deeply-held beliefs, and profound emotions, as well as the choices we make every single day. How we derive meaning from our existence is crucial to finding happiness, developing relationships, and building societies. In On Purpose, Paul Froese brings together data from large national and international surveys with interviews that illuminate the ways in which people from all walks of life grapple with their continuous search for reason, truth, sense, success, happiness, and-ultimately-transcendence. Froese argues that the desire to connect with something larger than oneself is a universal urge, manifested most directly, but far from solely, in religious communities. Written in vivid, accessible prose, On Purpose takes the reader on a journey through the complexities and consequences of life's most important question.

From the start, Froese admits that the answer to the question is deceptively simple: our purpose is whatever we imagine it to be. But what we imagine our purpose to be depends on innumerable factors beyond our control: our wealth, race, education level, upbringing, past experiences, and community. Froese argues that one's surroundings serve as a kind of soil that can either nurture purpose or foster meaninglessness. Framing the book around six key questions, Froese refuses to collapse the meaning of life into a single authoritative answer, as self-help gurus do. Instead, he deconstructs each question to reveal the social pathways that guide people to distinctive answers.

Through lively, engaging storytelling that mixes data and analysis with literary and historical examples of the quest for purpose, Froese sheds new light on a timeless and all-too-human quandary. The moral of the book is not that life has some ultimate meaning or no meaning at all, but rather that creating a purpose-driven life has always been a collective project.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Froese is the Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Baylor Religion Surveys. He is the co-author of America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--and What That Says about Us (OUP, 2010).

Review:

"The exercise of thinking about Tolstoy, the Limbaugh Dittoheads, and Oprah together is engaging of the imagination, but it is also analytically fruitful, as it invites intriguing comparative questions Froese's book is a bold and engaging step in this direction, and, as such, it is also an invitation for more steps of its kind."--Graham Hill, Sociology of Religion

"The book is a strong treatise about the core spirituality that guides the direction of our family choices, career decisions, and the simple tasks of daily life." --Publishers Weekly

"Few books are as timely and necessary as Paul Froese's On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life." --Patheos

"This text offers a pleasant and substantive reflection on the subject of creating meaning in
life."--PsycCRITIQUES: A Journal of the American Psychological Association

"This book seems to perform the impossible. It is both a splendid academic work and wholly relevant to any person, regardless of academic training or interest." --Reading Religion

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0199948909
• ISBN 13: 9780199948901
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256