The Cambridge Roundtable on Science and Religion

Human Progress Narratives and the Promotion of Human Flourishing

October 29, 2018

5:45pm

Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Is progress in human well-being or flourishing a matter of biomedical and social science research and policy efforts focused on narrow outcomes such as a single disease state, or a simple measure of income or a measure of positive affect? Or is human flourishing a matter of much broader ranges of states, outcomes, and ends that include happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and, for many, some notion of spiritual well-being?

Please be our guest Monday October 29th, 6 PM, at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge for our next Roundtable on Science and Religion featuring Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and his presentation On What Human Progress Narratives Get Wrong and the Promotion of Human Flourishing.

VanderWeele is also Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality, faculty affiliate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and Director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, holding degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance and applied economics, and biostatistics. He is the recipient of the 2017 COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies. He has published over two hundred and fifty papers in peer-reviewed journals, and is author of the book Explanation in Causal Inference, published by Oxford University Press.