The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning

“At once revolutionary and conservative . . .  positively warm, oddly free of moralizing, welcoming of disagreement and engagement.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Two Philosophers Ask and Answer the Big Questions About the Search for Faith and Happiness

For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. University of Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have shepherded thousands of students on the journey to faith and happiness in their blockbuster undergraduate course God and the Good Life.

Now they invite us into their classroom to wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. They distill guidance from Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion, and what sacrifices we should make for others.

The Good Life Method applies the timeless wisdom of philosophy to real- world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, this book pushes us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God.

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Col­lege Professor in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, director of the God and the Good Life Program, and director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She has published works in many leading philosophy journals. Her first book, Time Biases, was published by Oxford University Press. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Sullivan has degrees from the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and Rutgers University, where she earned a PhD in philosophy. She studied at Balliol College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar.
 
Paul Blaschko is an assistant teaching professor in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He heads up curriculum design and digital pedagogy for the God and the Good Life Program, and has recently been working to develop similar curricula at universities across the nation as part of an initia­tive funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Blaschko completed an MA in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a PhD at the University of Notre Dame, and held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship prior to being appointed to his current position.