Works of Love Newsletter
Stephen G. Post

Recent Events

Dear Friends:

I wanted to share some recent events with you. There are many of them, so I will just select a few:

First, Matt Lee and I were able to speak at the Templeton Foundation in Philadelphia on February 28. We both spoke on the theme of love, which is the key topic of the Foundation for 2023. I spoke about Sir John Templeton's philosophy of love, while Matt addressed love and human flourishing.

Second, Matt has been all over the world as the Director of Empirical Research for the big Human Flourishing Project out of Harvard and Baylor. It is so nice to see Matt leading the way. Love is one major measure of flourishing, among a number of others.

Third, I will be speaking on "Living and Serving with Compassion" at MD Anderson Cancer Hospital in Houston on March 31. (I spoke at Memorial Sloan Kettering several months ago.)

Fourth, we are hosting a very select conference at Oxford University's Linacre College. The conference is entitled "THE LOVE OF NATURE, NEIGHBOR AND SELF: A Conversation with the World's Great Spiritual and Moral Traditions." This is the second of our annual seminars at Linacre, scheduled for Friday, May 19th, 2023. These annual seminars cluster around the themes of benevolent love, spirituality, love of nature, and personal as well as social transformation. As implied by the title above, we wish to engage with the future of the human spiritual quest, with all of its practical implications and dimensions for flourishing. Our first seminar (May 6 & 7 of 2022) focused on the integrative thought of Pitirim Sorokin, the great Russian-American sociologist (d.1968), whose classic work The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation (Templeton Foundation Press, 1954/2002, with a Foreword by Stephen G. Post) inspires our work. Many thanks to the talented Stephen Bardle, DPhil Linacre. Linacre College is the ideal setting for our annual seminars because it was founded to bridge the growing divide between the humanities and the sciences. This is a closed conference for which invitations went out two months ago.

Fifth, I will be speaking at Columbia University Medical Center on April 14 at a major conference on Social Prescribing in Healthcare, a movement that our work on the health benefits of giving helped spark several years ago.

At this point, clearly the two most influential and successful Institute books have been Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Heathier, Happier Life by the Simple Act of Giving (Broadway Books/Random House, 2007), which continues to uplift readers young and old; and secondly, Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer's Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

If you have a moment, please do pick up your copies.

Stephen G. Post, PhD, Founder and President (2001-current)
The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love
unlimitedloveinstitute.org
stephengpost.com

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