From Harvard to Baylor for Human Flourishing Research

Although Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., did not initially intend to pursue high-level human flourishing research, he’s built a national reputation as a top voice in the field. After collaborating on the landmark Global Flourishing Study (GFS), Lee joined the Baylor faculty in 2022 as professor of social sciences and humanities in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion and associate director in the new Institute for Global Human Flourishing.

Q: What motivated you to pursue human flourishing scholarship?

I started my career as a criminologist with a Ph.D. in sociology. My dissertation and first book focused on criminal homicide. At first glance, my forthcoming book, Leadership for Flourishing (Oxford, 2025), seems completely unrelated. But, there is a connection: the factors that support flourishing are the same ones that, if absent, encourage self- and other-destructive behaviors. Loving relationships, a healthy social environment and a sense of sacred vocation in the service of a noble purpose are among the common denominators. I was able to bridge the topics of crime and flourishing through the practice of restorative justice.

Q: Human flourishing encompasses a broad range of topics. How do you focus your work as a social scientist in the academic discipline you have excelled in?

Short answer: I don’t. I am grateful that the discipline of sociology has provided me with a set of tools that have been very useful in helping to shape a new interdisciplinary field focused on flourishing. But the work has been multi-, inter-, and even trans-disciplinary. My perspective on flourishing has also benefitted from studying other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, public health and theology, and collaborating with scholars whose primary training has been in one of them.   

Q: What led you to Baylor, and what is it like working on a project of the Global Flourishing Study’s magnitude?

Before I joined Baylor, I was a senior research scientist and director of empirical research at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, and I was already collaborating on the GFS research team. Someone asked me during my job interview why I would leave Harvard to come to Baylor. Without hesitation I said, “Because it’s a step up.”

I was not disparaging Harvard, which is an amazing university and has been critical to my ongoing growth and development, or my many friends and colleagues there. In fact, my response was not about Harvard at all. What I meant is that flourishing is just one topic among many at other universities. It is different here. Flourishing is in Baylor’s DNA.

I understood that Baylor’s leaders had made a commitment to supporting the GFS and flourishing more broadly at a level that was, in my view, completely unprecedented. I saw that Baylor was beginning to tell its story in terms of flourishing. Of course, all universities support flourishing at some level, but what Baylor was doing was not mere rebranding, but an expression of a vocational commitment to supporting the abundant life (John 10:10), internally for Baylor students, staff and faculty, and externally for the world. I saw more than John 10:10 at Baylor. I also saw John 10:11: the good shepherd, the one willing to make sacrifices. The extraordinary vision and leadership of Byron Johnson (Ph.D., director of the Institute for Studies of Religion, executive director of the Institute for Global Human Flourishing and co-director of GFS) has been absolutely critical from the very beginning, and every conversation I have had over the last three years with leaders, staff, faculty and students has affirmed that Baylor is indeed uniquely positioned in the landscape of higher education to pursue and promote flourishing.