Tag Archives: Eudaimonia

Podcasts

J.P. Moreland talks about the meaning of happiness

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A while back I posted an article about the changing definition of happiness. I noticed then that Wes picked up on the post and he posted a lecture on happiness by J.P. Moreland.

Here is the short 26-minute lecture on happiness that he linked to. (He posted the video, I grabbed the audio)

This is really, really good. The same thing applies to love. A lot of people talk about love being a feeling, but I think rather that it is a decision that a person makes when they perceive that someone else can be moved closer to God, and they decide to act to make that happen.

Sometimes I worry about having grown up with non-Christian parents who really didn’t have much to tell me about what life was really about. But lectures like this really help me to learn the kinds of things that people really need to know.

I also just wanted to post a cleaned-up version of the Walter Bradley lecture that I had posted previously, with the noise removed, and the file size reduced. This is my favorite lecture of all. There are a couple of other versions of it in different venues here and here. These are all good, at least if you like Christians talking about the Christian life in a courageous, yet realistic way. I wouldn’t give these the attention I’m giving them unless I felt they were important.

About DropBox

I’m hosting some of those lectures using DropBox. I use it to share files with people.

News

What does “the pursuit of happiness” really mean?

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From Muddling Towards Maturity. He quotes Chuck Colson on the pursuit of happiness.

Excerpt:

Our founding fathers understood the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of a virtuous life. This concept of happiness comes from the Greek word eudaimonia—which refers to a life well-lived, a life rooted in truth. That is what happiness means, and that is what every man and woman has an inalienable right to pursue—a virtuous life.

And as I wrote in my book The Good Life, this is the definition of happiness that we need to reclaim in American life—especially within the Church. After all, a Barna survey revealed that more than half of evangelicals agreed with the statement: “The purpose of life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment.”

Come on. If the last 50 years have taught us anything, it’s that consumerism and hedonism (the pursuit of unbridled pleasure) do not lead to happiness, but instead to personal and societal misery.

[…]The goal is not pleasure; it is righteous living, decency, honor, doing good—in short, living a virtuous life.

I’ve heard J. P. Moreland write about this, too, in his book “Love Your God With All Your Mind”. (And again in “Kingdom Triangle”)

J.P. says in chapter 1 of LYGWYM that freedom is “the power to do what one ought to do”. he right to the pursuit of happiness means that no individual or government has the power to prevent you from living the virtuous life that God intended for you. That is why I come down so hard on the secular left. When they force Christians to deny their faith and act like atheists in public, (e.g. – to perform abortions or lose their jobs), then the government is thwarting the pursuit of happiness, rightly understood.