We’ve just come through National Public Health Week (April 6–12), a time when institutions across the country pause—at least briefly—to ask how we might build a healthier society.
The question behind that week is bigger than it sounds:
What does it really mean to be well?
On a recent episode of Created in the Image of God, I explored that question with Dr. Constantine “Kosti” Psimopoulos, a Harvard-based kinesiologist and bioethicist who works with the Human Flourishing Program and the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion. His work helped me reframe health around something far richer than symptom management or lifespan.
The Human Flourishing Program has identified five core domains that show up again and again in the data when we ask what a good life looks like:
- Physical and mental health
- Happiness and life satisfaction
- Meaning and purpose
- Virtue and character
- Close social relationships
These are ends in themselves, not just means to money or status. They’re also deeply resonant with the biblical vision of life “more abundantly” and with the spiritual wisdom we feature in Facets of One: many traditions, one God, one human destiny.
So in the spirit of National Public Health Week, and in light of my conversation with Kosti, I want to walk through these five domains as five questions—questions that push us beyond mere survival toward what I’d call Good Samaritan medicine for the whole person.
1. Health: Are We Treating Bodies or Persons?
The first domain is the most obvious: physical and mental health.
Scripture gives us a very high view of the body. Paul calls our bodies “temples of the Holy Spirit.” The Psalms say we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Even the resurrection of Jesus is bodily. Christianity is not about escaping the body; it’s about its redemption.
Kosti shared work published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association)—a landmark systematic review of nearly 9,000 studies—showing that spirituality and religion, broadly conceived, have measurable, positive effects on outcomes in serious illness (Tracy Balboni et al., JAMA, 2022). Patients who believe their faith helps them cope with cancer, for example, often do cope better—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
What struck me wasn’t just the correlation. It was this:
Even when clinicians aren’t personally religious, yet still respect and accommodate the spiritual needs of their patients—bringing in chaplains, asking about beliefs, simply acknowledging that dimension—outcomes improve.
Health care that sees persons, not just bodies, works better.
As someone who’s spent years navigating my own health challenges, I’ve learned the difference between being treated as a cluster of symptoms and being treated as a human being. In one case, you’re a problem to be solved. In the other, you’re a person to be cared for—created in the image of God.
The first question, then, is not “How do we eliminate all illness?”
It’s: Are we caring for whole persons, body and soul, or just managing malfunctioning parts?
2. Happiness: Is Our Joy Deeper Than Pain Relief?
The second domain is happiness and life satisfaction.
Here our conversation turned to the opioid epidemic. For a period of time in American medicine, pain itself became the central “vital sign.” Charts on the wall with smiling and frowning faces invited patients to rate their pain from 1 to 10. Report high enough pain, and powerful narcotics would follow.
The focus quietly shifted from healing to relieving suffering at any cost.
Pain is real. Suffering matters. Compassion demands we take it seriously. But when “make the pain go away” becomes the primary goal, we risk a kind of medical idolatry: worshipping comfort instead of seeking wholeness.
Kosti cited research showing that spirituality can have up to an 18% protective effect against harmful alcohol and drug use when you look across more than half a million people in longitudinal studies. Spiritual practices, faith communities, and a sense of the sacred don’t make all pain vanish; they give us a framework to endure and transform it.
From a biblical perspective, joy and happiness aren’t the same as perpetual comfort. Paul writes from prison, “Rejoice always.” Jesus, described as “a man of sorrows,” speaks of a joy no one can take away.
So the second question is: Is our vision of happiness big enough to include joy that can coexist with honest pain, or have we reduced well‑being to pharmaceutical numbness?
3. Meaning and Purpose: What Are We For?
The third domain is meaning and purpose.
The Human Flourishing Program treats this as an intrinsic good—valuable in itself, not just because it leads to money or status. Scripture agrees. From Genesis onward, humans are given vocation, not just existence:
- “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it…”
- Adam is placed in the garden “to work it and take care of it.”
- Paul speaks of each person as a part of the Body, with distinct gifts and functions.
In our conversation, Kosti described his own winding path: national champion mountain biker, multiple degrees in sports medicine, then a pivot into bioethics and theology after broken bones and hospital stays and a growing sense of calling. All of that culminated in a Harvard valedictory address on “A Moral Awakening in Medicine,” and in his work today shaping ethics training for scientists and clinicians.
You can hear the through-line: What am I for? How can I serve?
National Public Health Week rightly pushes us to think about social determinants of health—housing, food security, education. I’d add: vocational determinants of health. What happens to a society where countless people feel their work is meaningless, purely transactional, or worse, harmful?
As I watch the medical-industrial complex pile debt on young doctors and incentives on procedure-heavy specialties, I wonder how many are quietly losing touch with the original purpose that drew them to medicine in the first place: to heal.
So the third question is: Do we have a story big enough to tell us what we are for, not just what we are against?
Faith traditions at their best—and this is why we created Facets of One—offer that story. They remind us we are not accidents; we are called.
4. Virtue and Character: Who Are We Becoming?
The fourth domain is virtue and character.
The Human Flourishing Program treats character not as a private hobby (“I’d like to be a little more patient”) but as a public good. A society in which people habitually practice honesty, courage, justice, and compassion is one in which more people flourish.
In the Christian scriptures, the Sermon on the Mount and the “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians sketch a portrait of the kind of person we are meant to become:
- Poor in spirit, meek, merciful, pure in heart.
- Loving, joyful, peaceable, patient, kind, faithful, gentle, self‑controlled.
Kosti mentioned a sobering observation from a senior medical educator: in many cases, medical students graduate with less capacity for care than they had when they entered. The way we currently train physicians often hardens rather than deepens their compassion.
If that’s true, something has gone very wrong.
A health system that produces technically competent but morally stunted practitioners may increase certain metrics, but it fails the deeper test of flourishing.
I think of Paul’s famous line in 1 Corinthians 13: “If I have all knowledge… but have not love, I am nothing.” We might paraphrase for our time:
If I know all the latest protocols, can interpret every scan, can master every AI decision tool, but do not love my patient as my neighbor, I have missed the point.
So the fourth question is: In the pursuit of health, who are we becoming? What kind of people—and what kind of professions—are we cultivating?
5. Relationships: Who Is Our Neighbor in a Global Hospital?
The fifth domain is close social relationships.
National Public Health Week often highlights loneliness as a public health crisis. The data backs this up: isolation correlates strongly with depression, anxiety, and even mortality. We are, to use Aristotle’s line that Kosti quoted, “political animals”—social creatures made for life in community.
Jesus answered the question “Who is my neighbor?” not with a definition but with a story: the parable of the Good Samaritan.
- A man is beaten and left half‑dead.
- Religious and respectable people pass him by.
- A Samaritan—the despised outsider in that culture—stops, binds his wounds, pays for his care.
At the end, Jesus asks, “Which of these proved to be a neighbor?” When the correct answer comes, he says, “Go, and do likewise.”
Kosti’s mentor, the late Dr. Paul Farmer, summarized the ethical core this way:
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong in the world.”
In medicine and public health, this plays out in health deserts—places like Franklin, Mississippi, where doctors don’t go because the reimbursement rates are low and the lifestyle is difficult. It shows up in disability, where decisions are made about people with disabilities, not with them, prompting movements like “Nihil sine nobis” (“Nothing about us without us”).
It shows up when some communities receive cutting‑edge care while others get triage and a bill.
The scriptural answer is clear: every person we encounter is a neighbor, a bearer of the image of God, and—in the language of Matthew 25—a potential encounter with Christ Himself:
“As you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”
So the fifth question is: Whose well‑being counts as part of our own? Who do we include in our vision of a flourishing future?
Many Voices, One Call
These five domains of flourishing are not uniquely Christian. You can find their echoes in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Indigenous traditions—in different language, with different emphases, but pointing toward a shared human intuition:
We were made for wholeness—body, soul, character, calling, and community.
That conviction is what led us to create Facets of One, a simple devotional that places passages from different faiths side by side, “without argument, without division,” centered on the belief that God is one and that the image of God is refracted through many faces.
I’m increasingly convinced that to heal our culture’s fractures, we will need both:
- The rigor of programs like Harvard’s Human Flourishing initiative, pulling together data from around the world, and
- The humility to sit and listen as others bear witness to the One in whose image we are made.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing additional articles inspired by my conversation with Kosti, including:
- Taking the Mercenaries Out of Healthcare: Good Samaritan Medicine in a Medical‑Industrial Age
- Science and Faith Drink from the Same Well: What a Harvard Bioethicist Taught Me About Unity
- Vaccines, Trust, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
- Who Is My Neighbor in a Global Hospital? From Thessalonica to Franklin, Mississippi
I’ll release those on Saturdays for paid subscribers, as we continue to explore what genuine human flourishing looks like in a world of pandemics, debt, and division. I also plan to invite Kosti—and others working at this intersection of health, spirituality, and ethics—back onto Created in the Image of God so we can dig more deeply into these questions together.
Because ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, or institutions, or systems. It’s about you and me.
You are created in the image of God.
And God loves His creation.
The invitation is not merely to survive, but to flourish—and to help your neighbor do the same.
Sneak Peek: Next Week on Created in the Image of God
On next week’s episode, I’ll be joined by Robert Atkinson, an award‑winning author and scholar whose work focuses on unity and oneness in the religious sphere. His recent book, The Way of Unity: Seven Essential Principles for Peace in an Age of Division, offers a compelling vision of how religion, spirituality, social action, community building, and peacebuilding can converge.
We’ll talk about:
- Why the original meaning of “religion” (from religio, “to bind together”) is exactly what a divided humanity needs right now,
- How different faith traditions can move from competition to cooperation without erasing their distinctives, and
- How ordinary people can participate in building a more unified, peaceful world—one circle, one conversation, one act of neighborly love at a time.
Join us next Sunday at 8 PM Central for Created in the Image of God with Robert Atkinson.
