This event is co-sponsored by the North Carolina Study Center, InterVarsity Grad & Faculty Ministries, and the UNC Newman Catholic Student Center.

We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change—even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In their recently released book Why We Are Restless, Drs. Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.

Drawing on the insights from several french philosophers, Why We Are Restless explores the modern vision of happiness that leads us on, and the disquiet that follows it like a lengthening shadow. Arguing that the philosophy we have inherited, despite pretending to let us live as we please, produces remarkably homogenous and unhappy lives, Why We Are Restless makes the case that finding true contentment requires rethinking our most basic assumptions about happiness.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Benjamin Storey is the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Furman University. He is also the Director of Furman's Tocqueville Program, an intellectual community dedicated to investigating the moral and philosophic questions at the heart of political life. He has been awarded the Alester G. and Janie Earle Furman award for Meritorious Teaching. He is a Visiting Fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Division of the American Enterprise Institute, and has previously been a Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With Jenna Silber Storey, he is author of "Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).