studies on Virtues

There are real and very important differences between what we now call values and the virtues as they had traditionally been understood. Let me put it this way. A value is like a smoke ring. Its shape...

How are vices and virtues distinguished? How is a vice different from sin?…Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns...

Reaching back to the tradition of virtues and vices can also give us fresh eyes and expose new layers of meaning in our reading of scripture. Before I read Aquinas on sloth, I would have associated it...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson provides a wonderful analogy of what happens when we cultivate the virtues in our lives: W...

In his book On the Morals of the Catholic Church, Augustine reinterpreted the classical virtues through the distinctly Christian lens of love: I hold that virtue is nothing other than the perfect lo...

In this short excerpt written by the Christian Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas to his godson, he pontificates on the topic of courage: Usually courage is identified with dramatic and heroic acts. Though I...

Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character , notes that the Greek word “charaktér" was “used in connection with tools designed for engraving.” Greek philosophers noted that our past actions ...

In The Seven Storey Mountain , Thomas Merton describes his life of sin and his eventual turning to God in his early years. He despised and ridiculed the word virtue, which had come to mean “prudery p...

God intended man to have all good, but in . . . God’s time; and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God ha...

How are vices and virtues distinguished? How is a vice different from sin?…Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns...

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without l...

Very simply, a virtue (or vice) is acquired through practice— repeated activity that increases our proficiency at the activity and repeated activity that increases our proficiency at the activity and ...

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thinking about ethics back to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answ...

The priest Henri Nouwen learned humility on a mission trip to South America. He went expecting to pass on his wisdom to the poor and unenlightened. During his six-month stay, Nouwen concluded that a d...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

Everyone knows that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis we were perilously close to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon. Most people don’t know HOW close we were. Or how much we owe to Vasili Arkhipov. Ark...

I personally get some inspiration for getting at the nature of this work from a story told by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse was born in 1873, to a devout Cath...

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference bet...

Given life’s unpredictability and the inevitability of pain and hardship, what do we do when that pain and hardship show up on our doorsteps? In roughly AD 270, there was a man in Lower Egypt named An...

Carl Jung, one of the early pioneers of modern psychology, wrote this from his years of experience as a therapist: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of ...

When Johann Sebastian Bach sought to convey the heart of Christian truth through music, he chose the Mass as his foundation. His B Minor Mass begins with a heartfelt plea from the full chorus and orch...

The word radical comes from the same root as the word radish and literally means “root.” It’s truly a root word! But apart from the painful pun, it has something to teach us. So often, when we think o...

When you take a sip of coffee, you drink in hundreds of years of history. And not just insipid, teacher-droning-on-endlessly-in-a-monotone history but a tale rich with thrilling stories that delight a...

Shakespeare’s play, Measure for Measure is an exploration of the nature of power and mercy. Isabella, the novice nun, trying to persuade the tyrant Angelo to have mercy on her brother Claudio, utters ...

In 410 AD, Rome fell to the barbarian Germanic tribe known as the Visigoths, led by King Alaric. The idea of a “Christian” city (and empire) falling was a terrible defeat, not just militarily, but als...

In his insightful book, Delighting in the Trinity , Michael Reeves shares an interesting point of connection between the Protestant understanding of sola grati discovered by Francis Xavier during...

In this fictionalized pastoral counseling session, the Episcopalian Priest Robert Farrar Capon shares some eternal truths related to the nature of religion—and in conclusion, how Christianity differs....

Let me first tell you what I mean by the word “blessing.” In Latin, to bless is benedicere. The word “benediction” that is used in many churches means literally: speaking (dictio) well (bene) or sayin...

It is recognizing one’s nothingness, expecting everything from the good God, just as a little child expects everything from its father; it is not getting anxious about anything, not trying to make one...

Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was a British mathematician and inventor known for his enjoyment of talking. At one particular dinner, Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish polymath was going on and on about the v...