What makes an education socially valuable?

Education & Human Flourishing What Makes an Education Socially Valuable? We know how to calculate what a degree earns. We have a much harder time counting what an educated person makes possible in the lives of others. Victor Counted September 2026 The Flourishing Journal I have spent more of my life inside universities than most people spend in their first career. I earned two doctorates on two continents, one in health psychology (Western Sydney University, Australia) and one in religious studies (The University of Groningen, Netherlands). By the logic of a spreadsheet, I should be able to tell you exactly what that education was worth. But unfortunately, naively, I cannot.…

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The Life Beyond Achievement

The Empty Self A decades-old critique of American psychology helps explain why focusing on just the self never seem to be enough. By Victor Counted • The Flourishing Journal • 9 min read You finally buy the thing you have wanted for months. For a few days, perhaps a few weeks, it works. Something inside you settles. There is usually a rush of excitement. You feel more confident about your purchase. Then the feeling fades, and another object takes its place in your imagination. We usually explain this pattern as materialism or poor self-control. If you are a Marshmellow Test's fan, you perhaps might say that it is a lack…

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The Flavor of Character

The Savor of Character Character Formation The Flavor of Character Competence is light. It exposes. But light alone blinds a room, and the thing that makes truth bearable is not more light. It is salt. The Flourishing Journal It has been almost a month since I last wrote for The Flourishing Journal. I had planned to take a short summer break, but a health challenge extended that pause and forced me to slow down more than I expected. There is something clarifying about being forced to stop. You begin to notice your limits, the people around you, and the qualities that matter when productivity and competence temporarily recede. I found…

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The Good Life is a Sent Life

Why the Good Life Is a Sent Life — The Flourishing Journal The Flourishing Journal Missional Flourishing Why the Good Life Is a Sent Life We have learned to picture flourishing as something we gather and hold. The oldest blessing in Scripture, and the newest findings in wellbeing science, both say otherwise. By Victor Counted • The Flourishing Journal Missional theology has always confessed something strange about God: that God is a missionary God. We see this claim masterfully discussed in the seminal work of missiologist, David Bosch, in his book Transforming Mission. In other words, God the Father sends the Son. The Son sends the Spirit. The Spirit sends…

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The Sin of Calling a Human Being “Illegal”

Why Referring to Another Human Being as an "Illegal Alien" Is Ungodly and Evil | The Flourishing Journal Place & Belonging · Part II The Sin of Calling a Person "Illegal" Before a single home is burned or a single family is torn apart, a word has already done the work. The second essay in a series on the global anti-foreigner wave examines the vocabulary that makes it. VC Victor Counted The Flourishing Journal · July 2026 I want you to imagine a driver who breaks the speed limit on the way to work. We do not call him or her an illegal driver. Also consider a person who jaywalks…

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America at 250: The Psychology of What America Means to Us

America at 250: Safe Haven, Secure Base, and the Attachment We Owe Each Other | The Flourishing Journal The Flourishing Journal★Est. 1776 · Celebrating 250 Place & Belonging The Psychology of What America Means to Us On the 250th anniversary, place attachment theory offers a way to see two kinds of Americans clearly, and the debt one owes the other. VC Victor Counted, Ph.D. THE FLOURISHING JOURNAL Two hundred and fifty years is long enough for a nation to become invisible to the people who live inside it. We stop seeing the walls because we have never known a world without them. We stop appreciating the place because we have…

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The Cost of Competence

The Cost of Competence Formation · Vocation The Cost of Competence Light is rarely resented for being false. It is resented for being bright. What do you owe a room that would rather stay dim? The Flourishing Journal Walk into a dark room and turn on the light, and no one thanks you first. They wince. Hands go up to shield eyes that had made their peace with the gloom. For a moment you are not the person who helped them see but the person who hurt them. This is the strange social physics of competence. We are told it is the thing that earns belonging, the currency that buys…

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There Is No Such Thing as Spiritual but Not Religious

The Sacred Core: What My Students Taught Me About Religion and Spirituality Psychology of Religion The Sacred Core: Rethinking Religion vs. Spirituality A classroom argument over the "spiritual but not religious" turned into a deeper question: are religion and spirituality two things, or one search wearing different clothes? VC Dr. Victor Counted The Flourishing Journal It started, as the best class discussions often do, with a disagreement. This healthy disagreement, I must say, has been ongoing throughout the semester. This time, we were working through the standard definitions in my psychology of religion course, the ones every textbook offers: religion as the institutional and doctrinal thing, and spirituality as the…

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Amusing Ourselves to Death at 250

The Octagon and the Republic | The Flourishing Journal The Flourishing Journal  ·  Culture & Democracy The Octagon and the Republic When a nation celebrates its 250th birthday with a cage fight on the White House lawn, Neil Postman's long warning in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" finally makes sense. By Victor Counted, Ph.D.  ·  June 15, 2026 Neil Postman did not live to see this. He died in 2003, two years before YouTube existed and a decade before the smartphone colonized every moment of human attention. But on the evening of June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House, beneath a structure called “The Claw,” with jet…

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