The Pursuit of Happiness

People want to be happy. Nothing could be more obvious, and yet this common and evident goal is not as easy to achieve as it is to desire. The Christian tradition has understood happiness to be gained through relationship with God, and it has much to say about what will make us truly happy and what will not. This book examines happiness from a Christian perspective, using John Wesley as the focus of study because he understood happiness with God to be the very goal of Christian life. He also understood that Christian happiness needed to acknowledge the difficulties of life. This book seeks to learn from the wisdom of the past in order to imagine how Christians today might talk about happiness in a way that is faithful to the tradition and engages the world as well.