The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests

A master class from four renowned Harvard professors―an anthropologist, a physician, a theologian, and a historian―on discovering wisdom in challenging times.

In moments of uncertainty, to whom do we turn for solace and insight? How can we endure and overcome our own suffering? Harvard University professors Davíd Carrasco, Arthur Kleinman, Stephanie Paulsell, and Michael Puett turn to great thinkers, artists, and religious traditions not for definitive answers, but for lessons we can bring to our own quests for wisdom. Wisdom, they find, is not an abstract ideal but a way of living formed by caring for others and through everyday practices of solitude, ritual, and art. Based on their celebrated Harvard course, The Practice of Wisdom helps us brave loneliness, grief, and crises and bring beauty, healing, and spiritual significance into our lives.

Wisdom, they teach, is an ongoing quest―a practice to be lived and deliberately cultivated. Through five interwoven chapters, we travel from Chinese temples and Hindu ashrams to Emily Dickinson’s Homestead and US–Mexico borderlands. We encounter philosopher William James on the power of the subconscious after trauma; theologian Howard Thurman on solitude as a source of dignity; Toni Morrison on the interplay between mercy and goodness; writer John Phillip Santos on generational wisdom; physician Paul Farmer on medical compassion; and Confucius on ritual as a way of breaking the patterns that entrap us. We hear from Wendy Doniger, the eminent scholar of Hinduism, whose reflections present wisdom as a lifelong, unfinished art of seeking meaning, balance, and purpose.

Threaded throughout this short but powerful book is the image of the labyrinth: life as a series of turns that carry us through adversity and loss to hard-won clarity and grace. Led by teachers who have walked these paths, lost their way, and carried on, we learn the art―and practice―of living wisely.