Religious Happiness Comes from Community Feeling

Here's a church, just in case you've never
seen one before. From the National Center.

Such a busy week! I've barely had time to think, let alone read the news. All right, let me check my calendar. Any more screenings? No. Any big Hollywood meetings? No. Ho hum, I guess it's just a regular old day then. Good! I needed one of those.

Okay, let's see if I still remember how to do the news:  the USA Today reports on a new study that links religious happiness to feelings of community. Researchers have long known that religious people tend to be happier, but whether that happiness comes from the sense of community that places of worship encourage or from the spiritual experience itself was a mystery. This study seems to point to the first option.

Chaeyoon Lim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied data taken from the 2006-2007 Faith Matters Study. When comparing people who attend church at similar intervals, yet have different levels of friendship within the church, he found that people with more friends have almost double the happiness as those without any friends within the church. In face, "90% of the correlation between church attendance and life satisfaction can be explained if you have these close interactions," says Lim.

You can read the article for a breakdown of the different friendship groups and their happiness levels. This study gathered data from all major Christian and Jewish denominations, but not other religions because of a small sample size.

Weekend Viewing: The Dalai Lama's Happiness Conference at Emory

Hey, this is something to view on the weekend:  it's a full video of the Dalai Lama's visit to Emory University, moderated by NPR's Krista Tippett. I already wrote about this conference two weeks ago, but here is the full video of the conversation. Watching the video is better than reading about it, because the humor of the participants comes through much better, especially from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the Dalai Lama himself. You can also go to the official website to download a podcast version of the discussion.

With that said, you should get something to eat right now, because you'll be in it for the long haul:  this video is just shy of two hours long. Here are some time codes, in case you want to skip ahead (though maybe that defeats the purpose of the dialog in the first place):

• Beginning -  The Dalai Lama gives his introduction to happiness
• 7:19 - The Dalai Lama puts on a visor while Krista Tippett gives her introduction to the panel
• 10:36 - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gives his introduction to happiness in Judaism and the importance of making happiness for others
• 19:20 - Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori gives her introduction to happiness in Christianity
• 23:10 - Professor Sayyed Hossein Nasr gives his introduction to happiness in Islam while also using Buddhist terms
• 32:10 - Beginning of question and answer time, where Krista asks questions and everyone on the panel answers individually. This goes on so long that it's hard to document each question and answer, so you should watch the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
• 33:20 - The Dalai Lama talks about happiness in relation to suffering
• 54:18 - The Dalai Lama talks about the right to pursue happiness and his definition of happiness as the meaning of life
• 1:10:35 - Professor Nasr makes jokes about prayer in Islam
• 1:22:13 - Rabbi Sacks jokes about the importance of food in Judaism

Anyway, this post is becoming as long as the video itself, so here it is:


Pursuing Happiness with the Dalai Lama from Being on Vimeo.

The Dalai Lama's Happiness Summit

From Emory University.

The USA Today and Huffington Post report on the Dalai Lama's happiness summit at Emory University. His Holiness conducted a round-table discussion with some of the major emissaries of world religion, like Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, and George Washington University Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr. They talked about each religion's view of happiness.

According to Old Testament professor Carol Newsom, the Old Testament recommends the kind of happiness that comes from understanding the consequences of your actions, then doing the sorts of things that produce the consequences you want. Professors of the New Testament and Quran, however, say that the goal of life is not happiness in this life, but salvation in the next. The Dalai Lama, like most Buddhists, stresses the importance of happiness on a moment-by-moment basis.

These are complex issues, so you may want to go to the actual website instead of reading this short blog summary. You may also want to view live streaming of the event. Go to the Huffington Post story to look at the schedule.