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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Shari (00:01):
What makes a life worth living? Do we organize our lives around the pursuit of happiness, self-sacrifice, attaining comfort, gaining power, or wealth? In today's episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz invites us to explore the grand existential questions that make up the meaning of life. We'll discuss how various worldviews, philosophies, and religions are organized around different responses to these larger questions of meaning and purpose. McAnnally-Linz is a systematic theologian and Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He works at the intersection of theology, ethics, and cultural criticism. The book we discuss is titled Life Worth Living, which is a book based on a popular course offered to undergraduate students at Yale University. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. You use this phrase called “The Question,” and often the way that you lead folks into considering what the question is, is through stories. So kind of approaches from your perspective of choice. But what do you mean when you talk about the question?
Ryan (01:09):
Yeah, it's kind of our cagey term for this type of question that we can't really, once you formulate a specific version of it, something is off. So taking the title of the book or the class, what is a life worth living? Well, you've suddenly very inescapably suggested, oh, maybe some lives are not worth living. And coming where I come from with my Christian convictions, I think that's not true. I think every human life is worth living. So that way of phrasing the question doesn't work perfectly. If you say, what is the good life? Well, the, is there only one? If you say, what is a good life that's maybe too indefinite? And so we use the question to capture this broad type of thing that is that kind of, it's a question of our existential orientation, our way of hoping, our sense of the good, our orientation towards others and the future and the normative aspect of that, the should or ought side of it, the what's really worthy and good side of it. All of that gets lumped under “The Question” because in the end, we don't think you can just give one set of words to it.
Shari (02:36):
Yeah. So can you provide an example of a story where you think someone has really gotten clear about their question? Cause this gets particular too.
Ryan (02:43):
Yeah. So you can think of kind of big famous world historical examples, right? The Buddha is somebody we start the book with the story of his great renunciation where you have a prince, someone who is living within a framework that suggests a certain set of goods and a certain way of living is desirable. And he basically has it. He has the good life, and then it starts to kind of crumble from the inside a little bit. Not that he starts losing what he thinks is good, but that its goodness starts to ring hollow. He sees suffering, sickness, death, and he recognizes that these are coming for him too. And that starts to give him the sense that all the things that he's staking his life on are not sturdy enough to really hold a life. They aren't going to give what he thought they were promising. And that sort of moment of rupture is often how something like “The Question” comes into our lives where we say there was a bill of goods and I bought it, and now it doesn't turn out to be as well made and as excellent as I thought it was. What next? And that's the kind of opens up into that search for a deeper, truer set of goods and a better orientation towards what's really worthy.
Shari (04:31):
Yeah. So I'm curious to explore that question thoroughly. It seems to me that we may need to put aside some false assumptions about what the “good life” entails, because whatever culture we've been raised in or whatever belief system we've been raised in has some assumptions that we've probably accepted. So what have you encountered as some of the things that, some of maybe the false assumptions about what does it mean to have a life worth living that we would maybe need to bracket or set aside temporarily?
Ryan (05:04):
So there are a lot of them.
Ryan (05:10):
Everybody wants to be happy. Now, at some level that may be true. People, it may be very, very, very rare to find people who offered everything that's good, plus happiness, versus everything that's good without happiness would go for the latter. That seems unlikely. But when people say everybody wants to be happy, everybody's trying to find happiness, I think generally what they mean is happiness and the good life are co-extensive. A happy life is the good life. And that's really contestable from within the perspective. There's a broad array of philosophical and religious perspectives. Again, not that happiness is undesirable, although there's certain Buddhist perspectives would suggest that, oh, happiness is a little, it's sneaky. It will get you sucked in to a whole system of craving that is suffering even if you feel happy. But by and large, we need to break that sense that everybody wants happiness and it is the good life because there are other goods that get prioritized. And it really is that question of prioritization that often that things hinge upon, not would it be nice to be happy, but is it worth orienting my life around it?
Shari (06:40):
Yeah. I'm even thinking of tensions in the Christian tradition around happiness and kind of the inner arguments within the Christian tradition around prosperity gospel and whether that's a form of pursuit of happiness, is that worthy? And then where does self-sacrifice come in?
Ryan (06:56):
Right? There isn't a lot of the Christian tradition that says just being miserable is part of the good life. But I was just reading, I want to say Matthew 10, the other day, where you've got to love Jesus more than your son or your daughter, or you're not worthy of him. And I think the same would go for your happiness, right? And those kind of claims are remarkably common, and they help shake us up a little bit when we think, oh, it's really just about happiness. It's really just about peace of mind or any other subjective state really. There are plenty of views out there, I think including a lot of Christian views that suggest it's more than just subjective states. It's more than just how we feel.
Shari (07:57):
Yeah. I believe you bring up also meritocracy.
Ryan (08:01):
Oh yeah. Cause I mean, there are plenty of people who are oftentimes, the happiness is what matters. It's a breakthrough from success is what matters. People will spend all sorts of time pursuing success, and at some point we'll have that wake up moment and say, why am I doing this? Wouldn't it be better to be happy? And that may be a real step forward, but I think it's a shame if that's the end point of this kind of reflection.
Shari (08:35):
Yeah. So as we've said, you cover a lot of different kind of visions or end goals, goal doesn't feel like the right word, but ideals about what a flourishing life would look like. I mean everything from Daniel Tiger, a favorite of mine, to the Buddha, to Ida B. Wells, to some scientists. Could you describe a few of these different visions, and I'm especially curious about the sense in which they do, they're not perfectly compatible with one another. There are genuinely different answers to some of these bigger existential questions, but if you could give us a few examples of some of these visions of a flourishing life.
Ryan (09:25):
Yeah, I mean, I'll give the caveat that it is impossible to do that in any sort of comprehensive way during a short conversation.
Shari (09:33):
You want to do it in five minutes though.
Ryan (09:35):
Or a book.
Shari (09:37):
Sure.
Ryan (09:37):
Honestly a whole university course. But I can give some snippets that will give a sense. Cause I think this is a really important feature. There is a strand of contemporary thought that really badly wants to say that when you strip away all of the historical contingency and the cultural variations, you always find the same thing, that in the end, we all agree, right?
Shari (10:10):
I just got really sad thinking about stripping away all of culture and history, but I'm still with you.
Ryan (10:15):
Well, right. I mean, you don't need to, right? It would be sad, but I think the thought is, well, the culture and history is great then because it doesn't actually mean disagreement.
Shari (10:28):
There's a universal norm that we don't discover.
Ryan (10:30):
You accept the contingency and the variability by way of denying its ultimacy. It doesn't go all the way down, and I think that's just wrong. One example that comes to mind is this. So there are various perspectives that prioritize something like contest or victory as part of a good life. It's there in much of ancient Greek life. The agon, the contest between worthy opponents and winning is part of the good life. And I think this is alive and well today. There are large strands of our culture for whom coming out on top is a key value. It's inherent in the good life. To have a good life is in some level to be better. Now, contrast this with let's, let's take a Buddhist example. It's already come up, and so we can follow a thread. If the first noble truth is the truth of suffering or ill, and the second is that the source of suffering or ill is craving then your whole investment in a competitive agonistic vision of the good is binding you to suffering or ill, it's exactly the problem. It's just one instance of the problem, but it is a problem. And so actually there's no place for that in this vision.
Shari (12:45):
So if you dig under the layers, the premises are competing.
Ryan (12:50):
Yes, they're deeply competing and they're Christian versions of that kind of anti-superiority argument that I just gave. In fact, my colleague Miroslav is writing a book on this right now, kind of trying to critique, striving for superiority from a Christian perspective. And that's not an idle critique because it's critiquing real visions that actual people have about what matters and why.
Shari (13:21):
So, for folks who are discerning these big existential questions, excuse me, I think some people are pretty thrilled to think about this, and some folks might feel really overwhelmed by this kind of a proposition. So I'm curious, what are some hooks or some starting points for this kind of reflective work that you can offer?
Ryan (13:47):
Yeah. I myself am often both thrilled and overwhelmed. I can't remember if we put this Daniel Tiger in the book. I would've made it an entire book out of Daniel Tiger because of where I am in life stages and how much that mattered for my parenting at a certain point. But there's a Daniel Tiger episode where he's going to go on a roller coaster and he really wants to, but then he doesn't. He really wants to. And the mantra is sometimes you feel two feelings at the same time, and that's okay. And I…
Shari (14:22):
For anyone who hasn't watched, Daniel Tiger can be found on PBS and is based in Mr. Rogers.
Ryan (14:28):
Oh, yes. That's great. It provided a lot of the emotional moral vocabulary for my children when they were young, and I'm thankful for it. So I think there's something really important about that to recognize the validity of both of these sort of reactions. And as far as starting places go, there's no universal prescription. That's the hard thing. You've got to find “The Question” where it gets you, where it feels like it really matters. You've got to recognize that it is above your pay grade. You're not just going to figure it out. I like to distinguish between answering a question and responding to a question. I picked this up from Marilynne Robinson in one of her essays. Answering has a sort of definitiveness and finality to it, whereas responding doesn't necessarily have that. And I don't think that by and large, we're going to answer the question in our lives, but we're always responding to it one way or another.
Ryan (15:43):
And recognizing that your life has a kind of implicit orientation towards a vision of what's good and worthy is a good starting place to say, okay, so it's not like I have nothing or I somehow magically figure it all out. It’s, I’m in a process of figuring out what my perspective currently is of being open to revision of that based on new experience and new reflection. And by and large, that all goes best when you're in conversation with other people. I think the kind of vision of a lone sage on a mountaintop would lead us very far astray from what's going to work for most of us most of the time.
Shari (16:32):
Yeah. You bring up this question of individual discernment and communal engagement, which I think is really fascinating, and you tackle the question of human agency more thoroughly. Would you be willing to say a little bit more about that, this tension between receiving and participating in a community and having your own human autonomy?
Ryan (16:58):
Yeah. I will say some things about it with trepidation. I'm not a philosopher of these things and they are thorny, thorny…
Shari (17:07):
Or just share a story. Sometimes that's an easier way in.
Ryan (17:12):
But…I often find that thinking in polarities is helpful and say there are two poles to this, and if we collapse into one or the other then we've lost an important truth. And so it is the case that none of us just pops into the world fully formed. None of us makes ourself. Certain mythologies of self invention, not withstanding, we receive from the world around us. I think ultimately we're receiving from God. And at the same time, it sure seems to be the case that human beings have something like some wiggle room with respect to how they locate themselves in the world, how they're oriented, how they respond to a given set of values and priorities. Otherwise, things would just be the same all the time. And so while I think it would be foolish and arrogant to try to sever our relations to others and what we've inherited and just start anew, just I'm going to build it all from scratch, that would be pointless and prideful. At the same time, I think there's something dignifying in being encouraged to own one's normative perspective, to identify with it and to recognize a sort of responsibility for the shape that we project for our lives, which of course is not necessarily the shape our lives will take. So much is not under our control. But then when your life takes a shape that you didn't project, you're back into a place of some sort of limited, constrained responsibility for how you respond to that. I had a breakthrough moment playing the game of War with my daughter when she was younger.
Shari (19:40):
Say more about that.
Ryan (19:42):
Because I hated it so much. Kids, little kids will love playing War, and they will treat it as though something is happening other than humans being reduced to machines who flip cards over and process some numbers.
Shari (19:57):
As a parent in this game, you're playing a game in which you're turning over a card and the order of the cards completely determines the outcome of the game, right?
Ryan (20:03):
It's there. It is 100% determined from the start. You don't know that because you're not a computer, but you sure wish you could just show the computer some cards and they'd say, in this case, Grace won. And I'd say, good job, Grace. You won, and we didn't have to waste 45 minutes of our life, but I would start to get really frustrated playing this game, and I realized, I don't have any control over the game. I really don't.
Shari (20:36):
It's been determined for you.
Ryan (20:37):
It has been determined for me, but the game isn't all there is to life right now. I have a responsibility for the whole kind of way I comport myself in this predicament of intense constraint and determination. I can't change what happens in the game, but I can change how that happens to us, my daughter and I right now.
Shari (21:09):
Yeah. Which is very different from a game like poker or…
Ryan (21:13):
Right. Yeah. That's what we do. Well, it is only so different from a game like poker, and this is the interesting point. You have more flexibility in what you do in poker, but you still have a sort of responsibility for how you play the game.
Shari (21:28):
Yeah. You just have a slightly broader sphere of influence that you're operating.
Ryan (21:32):
And at different times in our lives and for different of us, we're kind of somewhere on that spectrum, but I think that for most of us, most of the time, there's some degree of that, agential responsibility for the shape of our lives that again, I think it's dignifying to acknowledge and live into that.
Shari (21:56):
Yeah. I think an interesting perspective that you offer is there's kind of a chart that you present where much of our lives we live kind of in our habits and practices like a non-reflective space, but the importance of what you're encouraging folks to do is to step into a reflective space. You called it identifying your normative perspective, but there's also this kind of transformation that can happen when we step back. So can you talk about these different, we can float in and out of those spaces if life disrupts us or we get this big dramatic reorientation. I think that's some helpful perspective too.
Ryan (22:36):
Yeah. One way that things can go wrong when you start digging into this big existential question is you can think that's all there is to life. It can become kind of all-consuming. We've had students who we had to at some point advise, I mean in colloquial terms, to just chill out a little bit, to just live a little bit of life and not always spend your time. We used a diving metaphor for this. Most of our life we're at the surface, we're chugging along, just living as we live without a lot of reflection. And then underneath the surface, there are these different kinds of reflection. There's reflection about questions of effectiveness and strategy. How do we get where I want to be going better than I am now? There are questions about our desires. What is it that I really want? Where do I want my life to be going?
Ryan (23:34):
And then there are these questions where we want to focus our attention in our Life Worth Living work, which are the questions of what's really worthy of my time, my focus, my orientation, all of those sort of questions, like if you were to dive down underwater and just stay there forever would be crushing, right? That's suffocating. So we need to have rhythms of moving in and out of reflection of seeing what happens to the shape of our lives when we try to let the results of some deep reflection percolate through them, seeing sometimes the reflection will turn out to feel kind of void or hollow when we try to, when we live into it, and that's important data to take into account. But so yeah, again, it's got that sort of polarity structure. If you're always only on the surface on autopilot, then you're just going to kind of go where the current of your life takes you, and there's a good chance that over time that'll drift in a direction that you wouldn't ratify if you stepped back to think about it. On the flip side, if all you ever do is reflection, then you're kind of missing the point of living it out.
Ryan (24:56):
It's like there's a famous Socratic dictum. The unexamined life is not worth living. I can test it in important ways. But it's also, it’s important that it isn't, examination is the life worth living, that it’s not the only thing there is to it.
Shari (25:16):
Yeah. Yeah. That's really helpful, especially for folks who are action oriented. They're going to love that part, right?
Ryan (25:23):
Right. And some of us are like, oh, let me just read books and think thoughts all the time and miss that that's a way of living a life, and you've got to wrestle with whether that's how you really ought to be living your whole life.
Shari (25:35):
Yeah. So I'm curious for you, how have you embodied or kind of taken on this journey yourself? And I'm curious if you could share a bit about what you've identified as “The Question” for yourself and how you've kind of grown and changed through your own journey with this.
Ryan (25:59):
This is actually a relatively hard question for me because I've experienced a real up and down as this sort of work has become more central to my professional life. There can be a way in which there's a threat of performativity in the negative sense of performativity where because so many things are built around advocating for this kind of reflection, I'm actually less open to the reflection itself.
Shari (27:02):
Can I ask a follow up question on that thread? Yeah. I mean, it was striking as I read the book that a lot of the examples that are offered there are people who we would say are pretty remarkable. You're talking about Simon Peter, the rock on which the Christian church has built, and you're talking about folks like Ida B. Wells and James Baldwin who have lived, or even early martyrs. And for many of us, our lives compared to that seem rather mundane. Is that part of it?
Ryan (27:46):
I don't think… That could be. There could be a real sort of siren song of the heroic and the big, and that could set you up for deep disappointment when it turned out that your life was ordinary and quiet. I am a big partisan for the goodness of the ordinary. If there are countless stories worth telling of lives lived in deep contact with “The Question” and a real robust answer to that question that we just, they're not recognizable names. I think if I can just name one person and then she can, if she ever hears this, get really embarrassed.
Shari (28:49):
Sure.
Ryan (28:52):
My friend Asha is somebody who I think has lived reflection on “The Question” and her own deep Christian response to the question in profound and important ways that have shaped my life, the life of my kids. She was family pastor at our church for a while. And I think those kind of ordinary stories of faithfulness to a vision and of embodiment of ideals that we would endorse are really, really important. Miroslav will often talk about his parents or his nanny growing up in Croatia, who was not a philosopher, not a theologian, but who lived a response to “The Question” that was deeply profoundly shaping for him. So when I struggle with it, it's not really because of that. It's more because life can be hard and our desires and our habits are not super tractable, and so we can wind up disappointing ourselves and disappointing others, and then we have to figure out how to respond to that. And the thing that keeps me, well, there's the risk of flight into abstraction as a way of getting away from that real stuff. But the thing that keeps me grounded is the interactive, the participation in communities that keep asking even when we don't feel like we're responding well, that keep holding us to a certain standard of seriousness with respect to the shape of our lives, rather than just the kind of inertial frittering away of the time that we're given.
Shari (31:21):
Where have you found those kinds of communities for yourself?
Ryan (31:25):
So one really important one is my church here in New Haven. That's been key. They also, I mean, I have the good fortune of those communities cropping up on an almost annual basis in my Life Worth Living seminar at Yale and among the teaching team for that seminar. And so that's an example of one case where we share a lot of normative commitments at church, the centrality of Christ and things of that sort. We don't share a lot of normative commitments in my seminar and in the teaching teams, and I think both kinds of those communities have been important and grounding for me over time.
Shari (32:14):
Yeah, that's super helpful. Thank you. I am curious if there's one, a question that you wish I would've asked that we can pause and go back and ask, or if there's a question that you would offer to folks that they continue to ask as they explore their own questions.
Ryan (32:36):
So in the story of the rich young man or rich young ruler in the Synoptic Gospels, I'm going to gloss Matthew, Mark, and Luke all together, because I can't keep them straight in my head.
Shari (32:52):
That’s all right.
Ryan (32:56):
This rich man comes up to Jesus, asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus gives an answer and the guy says, that's great, I already do all of that. And the text says, Jesus looking at him, loved him, and then said, you lack one thing. And sell all you have and give to the poor. This is a very famous passage, but maybe this is a question to leave folks with. Where in your life would Jesus look at you that way with that love that says there's something you lack? Maybe it's like the rich ruler, you lack because you have too much, or maybe it's a different kind of lack, and Jesus would have you do more.
Shari (34:02):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.