E28. Aquinas on Happiness | Dean Jennifer Frey

Welcome to Researching Happy with Dr Matthew Iasiello

This is the weekly podcast, sharing the stories behind the studies of the wellbeing research world. 

Welcome to Episode 28. This week we host Professor Jennifer Frey onto the podcast, who is the recently appointed Dean of Honors College at the University of Tulsa. Listen I get up pretty early for some of these conversations, and this week it was early enough for me to forget that we even have Deans at Australian Universities… which is sad when you think one of my closest mentors in research was himself, a Dean. 

Anyway, as you’ve heard on the show, we want to expand this conversation beyond psychology, and hear how other disciplines understand Happiness. Theology and philosophy are two areas that I really want to learn more about, and I know that Thomas Aquinas is someone who famously crosses these two worlds. Thomas Aquinas is a Saint in the Catholic Church, and to be honest, when I started looking to see if anyone was writing about Aquinas and Happiness, I was expending some professor sitting in a dusty office somewhere who would be happy that someone who was just happy to be contacted. That’s when I came across Dean Frey’s work, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. She is by far the most popular guest I’ve had on the show, a mother of 6 children, and the host of her own podcast, Sacred and Profane Love, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in lessons in virtue from literary art. 

I learnt so much from this conversation, and I expect you will too. We cover a lot of ground between Aristotle to Aquinas, and I think there is a lot for the positive psychology world to learn than the simplistic hedonistic/eudaimonic distinction that everyone cites.   

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