How College Students Are Finding Meaning (#322)

Religion on the Mind

Religion, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today's episode, I reconnect with Jim Wellman from the University of Washington to discuss his fascinating undergraduate course, "A Life Worth Living." We explore how Jim guides students through fundamental questions of meaning and purpose that are often neglected in contemporary education. Jim shares touching stories of student transformations and we reflect on our own spiritual journeys—his recent reconnection with Christianity and my parallel work as a therapist addressing similar existential questions. We discuss Lisa Miller's research on spirituality's neurological benefits, Kantian ethics, and Tom Holland's thesis that Christian values underpin even progressive movements. Throughout our conversation runs a shared concern: in a consumer-oriented culture that "flattens" human experience, how can we cultivate deeper sources of meaning? This conversation felt like a vintage episode—intellectually rich yet deeply personal. Previous Episode with Jim: The Surprising Value of Megachurches (#95) Highlights 10:05 Exploring Meaning and Identity in Students 27:04 The Intersection of Spirituality and Science 44:15 Ethical and Moral Development in Education 01:00:00 Cross-Cultural Literacy and Understanding 01:08:29 Human Flourishing and Its Importance ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Edited by Josh Gilbert (joshgilbertmedia.com -- he is accepting more work!) Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everybody, to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity and the modern world of science and culture very seriously.
0:12.5	Returning to the show after a just depressing four and a half year absence.
0:21.5	Jim Wellman of the University of Washington, Jim, you, you were back talking with me late,
0:29.2	December 2020.
0:30.4	So right around the time we got the vaccines, we were talking about megachurches.
0:37.1	The episode's called the surprising value of megachurches. The episode's called The Surprising Value of Megachurches, and you had done some collaborative
0:43.3	research and published a book on all of that.
0:45.6	So if people want to hear that, we'll have a link to that in the show notes.
0:48.3	That's not what we're talking about today, but just kind of, that was a really fun conversation.
0:52.3	And I don't know, it'd be interesting to revisit it now on the other side of COVID.
0:56.6	Yes. I do want to say this, a little editor's note before we begin here. This is my third straight recording today with no more than 30 minutes in between any of them. I am making the most of my quote unquote spring break by working my ass off.
1:13.3	It's fun.
1:13.7	I'm having actually a lot of fun today.
1:15.3	But I do reserve the right to at some point go, okay, I'm getting too loopy.
1:20.2	We got to go to the patron only.
1:21.7	We got to turn this into a patron only second half where we are shielded as a city might be from a levy or a harbor from a
1:30.9	breakwater, a little bit by some more privacy to work out our quirks in safety.
1:38.9	Anyway, you have been working on this class, and we've been talking about it for a couple years.
1:45.7	It's called a life worth living.
1:48.5	I want to start here.
1:49.4	We're going to, mostly we're going to talk about the class.
1:51.6	And you sent me the syllabus, and I have questions about sort of like, what is the project that you are walking these undergraduate students through?
	...

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