Good Life Instruction Resources

LWL’s continued integration into WCU courses creates opportunities to reach students across disciplines and at different stages of their education. Current and developing curricular connections include:

  • HON 100: Self-Awareness & Development
  • HON 382: Leadership & The Good Life
  • HON 212: Moral Choice in a Technological Age

HON 100: Self-Awareness & Development

As part of this multi-module course, students apply a social-emotional leadership lens to answer the question: Who Am I?

Key Topics:

  • The Window to the Self, Differentiation, and the Developmental/Systems Frameworks
  • Who am I because of or in spite of my relationships and communities?
  • Storytelling - Defining Moments
  • Is there a true self?
  • Passion & Vocation

HON 382: Leadership & The Good Life

What makes a good life? What does it mean to live a flourishing life? What does leadership have to do with a life well lived? These are difficult questions that require intellectual muscles many of us have left untrained; we need one another’s help to ask and answer them. We will explore these questions by engaging with various philosophical and spiritual traditions, featuring visits from contemporary individuals who aim to shape their lives by some of the traditions in question.

Along the way, we will dive into texts from some of the great thinkers specifically related to leadership and the role of a leader in cultivating a good life for one’s individual benefit as well as for the sake of a community. Throughout world history and in contemporary practice, leaders participate in spiritual expression to: 1) cultivate individual and communal identity; 2) address progress, endure suffering, or make meaning; 3) develop ethical/moral paradigms for decision-making. This seminar explores the relationship between leadership and the good life (broadly conceived).

Through reading, guest lectures, service-learning, group discussion, and written reflection, this course utilizes various disciplines as an interdisciplinary course (e.g. philosophy, ethics, communication studies, medicine, poetry, psychology, anthropology, literature, astronomy, women’s and gender studies, and sociology). Most often, the course will draw upon the broad fields of philosophy, literature, and leadership studies. The course pays special attention to issues of: religious privilege, inter-tradition (and non-tradition) dialogue, and spiritual expression and influence.

HON 212: Moral Choice in a Technological Age

This course addressed the many ethical problems and issues confronting the individual in contemporary society. Students ask: What should I do? How should we work together? What does it mean to live a good life? How do our emerging technologies impact the complexity of our moral decision making?

Sample Assignments

  • Ethical Leadership Group Project
  • Beautiful Life Interviews: The purpose of the assignment is for students to interview two older adults (65+) about a person who they (the older adults) have met or worked with whom has lived a “beautiful life” (or whom they would consider a “beautiful soul/beautiful person,” that is, someone who has “inner beauty” or “deep beauty” as opposed to superficial beauty. Interviewees are asked to answer the following:
    • Have you ever known someone you would say lived a “beautiful life” or whom you
      would call a “beautiful soul”? If so, tell me about what you think of when you hear the
      phrases (“beautiful life,” etc.).
    • What characteristics does/did that person have? Why do you think these characteristics
      are valuable? What do you think motivated the person to develop these characteristics?
    • What did the person do or say that prompted you to consider the person as a “beautiful
      soul/person” or one living a “beautiful life?”
    • Have you known people who you might consider “good” even though you would not call
      them “beautiful souls” or say they lived or were living a “beautiful life?” If so, what
      would you say is the difference between these two ways of describing people?
    • Add your own questions that may be relevant. Keep the conversation going at least 30
      minutes.
  • Building Trust