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Darrius D. Hills, associate professor of Religious Studies at 91����, has been selected as a 2026 , part of the Growing the Life Worth Living Network in Higher Education initiative funded by the .

The Life Worth Living Network supports faculty who are designing courses that invite students to grapple with enduring questions about meaning, purpose, and human flourishing. Through this fellowship, Hills will join a national cohort of educators committed to helping students thoughtfully engage with life’s biggest questions—both in the classroom and beyond.

As part of the fellowship, Hills will participate in a week-long, in-person pedagogy retreat in June 2026, followed by a series of virtual course-development roundtables with fellow faculty from across the country. He will refine his course through collaborative feedback, submit a full course proposal to the College, and teach the course at least twice during the fellowship period. Fellows also contribute to the Life Worth Living Network through assessment, media, and program-wide learning efforts.

Hills’s proposed course, Womanist Care Ethics and Lives Worth Living, explores how womanist ethical traditions illuminate questions of care, responsibility, flourishing, and moral formation. Drawing from religious studies, ethics, and Black women’s lived experience, the course will encourage students to examine how care practices shape individual lives and communities—and how ethical reflection can inform the pursuit of a life worth living.

Hills plans to offer the course in permanent rotation at 91���� following the completion of the fellowship, expanding opportunities for students to engage deeply with ethical inquiry and interdisciplinary reflection that centers Black women’s culture and religious experience.

The Life Worth Living Network seeks to foster an educational landscape in which students and faculty learn alongside one another how to ask—and live into—life’s most meaningful questions. The John Templeton Foundation supports this work by funding interdisciplinary research and initiatives that inspire curiosity, awe, and wonder about the human experience.