From “Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most” by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
It can be surprisingly difficult to keep the Question clear. For a moment, it seems we’ve got it. A moment later, it’s slipped through our fingers. A conversation about what sort of life is truly worthy of our humanity becomes a conversation about tips and tricks to help us life a long, happy, healthy life. A question about the truth of flourishing life can suddenly become one about what sort of life we happen to want.
Of all the communities where we’ve had these conversations, one stands out as most naturally able to keep the Question clear. Within the cinder block walls of Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, incarcerated Life Worth Living students have no problem tracking the distinction between “what I want” on the one hand and “what’s truly worth wanting” on the other. They know themselves, in some sense, as “criminals.” (Matt once accidentally [and red-facedly] referred to them as such, and to a man [the course was taught in a men’s facility], they owned the label entirely.) That means they begin with the assumption that for a substantial period of their lives, they were wholeheartedly pursuing a mistaken vision of life. It was more or less exactly what they wanted, but it was not in fact worth wanting. This gave the men at Danbury FCI a serious leg up on just about all of their fellow Life Worth Living students on the “outside.”