The quest for quality of life

From the perspectives of various disciplines, this book provides a critical reflection on, and evaluation of, what is currently referred to as ‘a good life’, ‘quality of life’ or ‘fullness of life’. Against the backdrop of a striking overestimation of a one-sided materialism, people realize that they need to cross the boundaries of the status quo and reshape their evaluation systems in the light of their spiritual desires and ethical values. To make the right decisions, they have to re-think what is truly valuable to them. For this purpose, the book starts with some disciplinary approaches seeking to answer the following questions: what is quality of life?; in which human conditions and practices can it be detected?; and how can these conditions and practices be established or improved? Subsequently, different aspects of the quality of life – as expressed in concepts and images drawn from scholarly and spiritual literature – will be examined. Finally, the findings of this part will be elucidated with quality of life cases from the Netherlands.