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The Martin Institute & the Dallas Willard Research Center (MIDWRC) at Westmont College are pleased to announce that the winner of the Book Award for 2025 is A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), by Tyler J. VanderWeele.

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was a philosopher at the University of Southern California and a Christian spiritual writer, authoring books such as The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, and Knowing Christ Today. 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.

The MIDWRC Book Award Program was created in 2015 to help place an enduring emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Dallas Willard by recognizing original written work that addresses one or more of Willard’s four critical concerns that he specified toward the end of his life. Willard was concerned with (1) treating God’s kingdom purposes and activities in the world as fundamental realities; (2) upholding that these and other domains of reality can be understood as knowledge on an appropriate basis of evidence; (3) developing an intellectually defensible, multi-disciplinary model of the human person and Christian spiritual life as the best path to human flourishing; and (4) continuing to develop ways to make the different aspects of Christian spiritual and character formation publicly testable.

Pitched to an academic and public health audience, 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. One of our judges wrote, “I found this book fascinating . . . 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.”

In his review of VanderWeele’s book in Public Discourse, Charles Camosy writes, “Tyler VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard, has written a watershed book. Published this past September with the University of Notre Dame Press, A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing will, in my view, eventually come to be understood as a groundbreaking classic. It is not overstating the case to say that, if this book is given its due, it could mark the beginning of a new and even stunning moment—one that makes space for explicitly theological ideas and reflection within the highest-level academic discussions of health. I hold this view for the following reasons: (a) the perch from which VanderWeele is working and writing, (b) the cultural moment and context in which he is working and writing, and (c) his confident, robust, and persuasive theological approach.”

As director of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, VanderWeele is one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of human flourishing. For such a researcher to see spiritual health—specifically, new life in Christ—as essential to human flourishing both represents and furthers a cultural reawakening to the value of Christian knowledge for spiritual and moral formation. We hope that honoring VanderWeele’s book will help promote and further Willard’s commitment to establishing Christian spiritual and moral formation as publicly accessible knowledge.