Finite and Infinite Games - Prof. Niki Harré - #17
Niki Harre is a professor of psychology and head of the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, known for applying psychological research to questions of sustainability, community, and how people live well together. She has published over 200 scholarly articles and is the author of Psychology for a Better World: Working with People to Save the Planet and The Infinite Game: How to Live Well Together, both published by Auckland University Press in 2018. In 2021, during a sabbatical year, she appointed herself a secular priest, read the entire Bible, attended church weekly, delivered her own Sunday services, and took personal vows of simplicity, hospitality, and pause, an experiment she undertook as a committed atheist to discover what the secular world loses when religion fades. Her account of that year is documented in her 2026 book The Calling: A Year Exploring What the Secular World Can Learn from Religion, published by Auckland University Press.
Expect to learn what distinguishes finite games from infinite games and why that distinction changes how you see competition and ambition, how the goalpost-moving trap works in money and fitness and why it keeps people perpetually dissatisfied, why chasing wealth does not qualify as an infinite game, how finite games can serve a larger infinite purpose when used deliberately, what drove an atheist psychology professor to spend a year attending church and reading scripture, what she expected would happen versus what actually happened when she ran secular services for the public, why the Christian community she encountered was far more welcoming than her secular peers, what psychological wisdom she found in Christian literature that her academic training had never touched, why the concept of self-esteem is, in her view, one of the more damaging ideas her own discipline has produced, how humility and genuine confidence are more closely connected than most people assume, whether secular society has found anything that does the job religion once did, and what she thinks is genuinely irreplaceable about religious practice for those who want to live outwardly rather than inwardly.
Niki Harre online:
Website: nikiharre.com [http://nikiharre.com]
University profile: profiles.auckland.ac.nz/n-harre [http://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/n-harre]
Secular priest project: secularpriest.org [http://secularpriest.org]
The Infinite Game (2018): aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz [http://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz]
The Calling (2026): aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz [http://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz]