Pictured as “immensely successful” and “wildly popular and influential,” “God and the Good Life” is a philosophy course that Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko teach at University of Notre Dame. Now, thanks to a suasive phone call from a Penguin Press editor, it’s the basis of this new-in-2022 book. In it, the authors go about “applying philosophy everyday,” publishersweekly.com explains, adding, “Those pondering the perennial question of how to live a good life should start here.”
Spiritual seekers will gravitate to the second part of the book. “This is where we take on some of the bigger, deeper existential questions about faith, suffering, meaning, and death,” Blaschko told The Observer, ND’s student daily. And though “the authors have an admitted perspective as practicing Catholics,” Kevin Holtsberry notes in his collectedmiscellany.com review, “I think they truly are seeking the truth, not conversion.”
Their ideas, Publishers Weekly affirms, “can help one find their way to eudaemonia, an Aristotelian concept that means ‘having fulfilled your function as a human being’.” As John Jenkins observes—he’s Notre Dame’s president—“I know of no question more worthy of our time and attention than, ‘What is a good human life, and how do I live it?’.”
The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning
By Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko
Penguin Press, 2022
