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The Martin Institute and the Dallas Willard Research Center (MIDWRC) at �Ļ�ӰԺ College have chosen ’s “” (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.

The award recognizes original written work that addresses one or more of Willard's four critical concerns that he specified toward the end of his life:

• Treating God's kingdom purposes and activities in the world as fundamental realities.
• Upholding that these and other domains of reality can be understood as knowledge on an appropriate basis of evidence.
• Developing an intellectually defensible, multi-disciplinary model of the human person and Christian spiritual life as the best path to human flourishing.
• Continuing to develop ways to make the different aspects of Christian spiritual and character formation publicly testable.

“VanderWeele’s book substantially engages each of Willard's four key concerns at a level of discussion similar in spirit to Willard's own scholarly work,” says Steve Porter, senior research fellow and executive director of the Martin Institute.

“I found this book fascinating,” one of the MIDWRC judges wrote. “It is deeply and intelligently theological. VanderWeele also works with a sophisticated and integrative understanding of the human person as he considers health not just a matter of the body and the mind, but also of the spirit. I can’t imagine anything more thoughtful, deep, profound and penetrating on this subject.”

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was Willard 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. The MIDWRC desires to help more and more Christian individuals and institutions understand, communicate, and implement reliable and psychologically realistic pathways to become like Jesus for the sake of the world.