CTI Inquiry on Thriving Culminates in a Special Journal Issue

A new special issue of Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences presents research from CTI's Inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts, a study program on psychological science for theologians funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

The Center of Theological Inquiry’s Inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts has culminated in a special issue of the journal Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences (vol. 13, 2026), Theologies of Flourishing/Thriving, edited by Michael Spezio of Scripps College.

The issue asks questions of global concern at the heart of the inquiry. What makes for human thriving? Are thriving and flourishing the same thing? And when theology offers visions of the good life, what does it owe to the persons whose lives those visions address?

From 2023 to 2025, CTI convened two cohorts of theologians and philosophers of religion for cross-training in psychological science. The program was co-directed by then-Director William Storrar, Associate Director Joshua Mauldin, and Spezio, with Andrew Davison (University of Oxford), Clifford Anderson (Yale University), and Brick Johnstone (Shepherd Center) joining at various stages. Each member of the training program was paired with a mentor in psychological science. Together they read the primary research literature on wellbeing and on the standards by which psychological claims earn trust, and each member then brought that learning to bear on their own theological research engaging psychological science.

The work reflects CTI’s distinctive conception of theology as interdisciplinary inquiry, in which theology does not survey other disciplines from above but is changed by engaging them. At the program’s core was a method for moving carefully from a theological concept to a measurable construct and on to the evaluation of evidence, freeing theology from reliance on popularized psychology.

Four articles from the inquiry appear in the issue. Michael Bräutigam (Melbourne School of Theology) maps pathways for integrating theology and positive psychology. He tests a model of "ironic thriving" that brings the Lutheran insight that the believer is at once justified and a sinner into conversation with cognitive dissonance theory. Marion Grau (MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society) and Lisa Legault (Clarkson University) develop "constructive climate anger" as a mode of thriving, pairing the virtue tradition with a new empirical scale tested on nearly five hundred respondents. Barbara McClure (Brite Divinity School) argues that thriving and flourishing are related but distinct, and calls for a new wave of positive psychology that engages religious traditions seriously. Spezio proposes a framework for theological claims that address the wider public and remain accountable to publicly accessible evidence.

In his editorial, Spezio likens a scholar's first careful reading in another discipline to Keats's first encounter with Homer: strange territory at first, but worth patient observation. Theologians and psychological scientists, he writes, each find worlds worth their time in the other's field. "Neither field becomes the other, both attend and learn, and are better for the encounter."

Read the open access special issue here.