‘Theology of Health’ Wins Book Award

The Martin Institute and the Dallas Willard Research Center (MIDWRC) at Westmont College have chosen Tyler J. VanderWeele’s A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press) for the 2025 Book Award.

The MIDWRC Book Award program was created in 2015 to help place an enduring emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Dallas Willard, a philosopher at the University of Southern California and a Christian spiritual writer, who authored numerous books, including The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, and Knowing Christ Today.

VanderWeele, one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of human flourishing, directs the Harvard Human Flourishing Program. He is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb professor of epidemiology in the departments of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was a highly influential figure in the late 20th-century renewal of interest in Christian spirituality and character formation. The Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Research Center exist to help establish Christian spiritual and moral formation as a domain of publicly available knowledge.