Prudence takes into account a deeper wisdom about the human condition than can be gleaned from a simple cost-benefit analysis. It understands that human communities are not merely about justice and the Gross Domestic Product, but about love. And sacrificial love doesn’t hesitate to rush in even against the worst odds. Recently I sat at [...]
Who would have thought that a teacher might convince a student that living a virtuous life was both a challenge and an adventure? David Hein apparently has done just that in the classroom, and those classroom teachers who read his book might well come to learn from him and agree with him—and do the same [...]
While slouching may not be sinful, it can create an atmosphere of disregard, carelessness, and sloth. It favors bad habits that may facilitate vice. Hence, people can combat these horrible consequences by living up to standards of propriety that favor effort and consideration in a well-ordered society. One great tragedy of radical individualism was the [...]
The Ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven stuns the human mind. It is a terrific display of the glory, grandeur, and majesty of God’s power. The eternal Son of God, having taken on the flesh of humanity, now ascends to the heavenly throne to sit at the right hand of the Father. Jesus enters the [...]
When I think of Lent, I think of suffering—particularly my own suffering. Lent brings up the juvenile dread I felt as a child when I knew that candy and TV were on the chopping block. Even throughout high school and college, I always associated Lent with a melancholic focus on penance. Listening to the Church’s [...]
American culture has an opportunity now for renewal through its people of faith. We are being called to care for one another with love. We are being called to live out our virtue in service. The American soul has withered, and awaits an infusion of the lifeblood of love. Whether or not we respond may [...]
Friendship is a receptive disposition of the soul which is ready to act for the good of the other when called upon, but which does not demand to be called upon. A man has to respect the freedom of his friend, or else a man will end up seeking out his own will to the [...]
Like it or not, Grace exists despite Oren Cass’s inability to sense it. Now is the time to appeal to God to send His Grace to this age of little faith. Such a move is the only one that makes sense in the face of the postmodern decadence that now prevails. A disturbing new trend [...]
What John Henry Newman says about conscience shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the “socially constructed” result of any number of cultural influences. The conscience is a messenger from God: giving saints courage to resist tyranny, even unto death. by Emmeline Deane, oil on canvas, 1889 The [...]
From the Annunciation to the Presentation, from the Wedding at Cana to the upper room in Acts 1 and 2, the Mother of God’s life is undergirded and infused with humility. About a year before being received into the Catholic Church in 2004, the biggest obstacle to conversion for me, a Protestant, who had moved in [...]
It would be far too easy to see this life as merely a vale of tears—a time of trial we must experience and through which we must suffer with such virtue as we can muster, so as to reach a higher reward in the next life. What then could possibly make this life, on its [...]
Democracy requires compromise, and compromise requires the two virtues lacking most in American society–prudence and humility. What hope is there, then, now that technology and social media have only deepened the virtue deficit? In October 2012, during a televised presidential debate President Barack Obama earned laughs and pleased pundits when he mocked his opponent, Governor [...]
Where there is Pride, there is prejudice; where there is prejudice, there is hatred; where there is hatred, there is the dehumanizing of the enemy; and where there is the dehumanizing of the enemy, there is the extermination that follows. As I watch the rise of the politics of hatred sweep like an angry wave [...]
“Fortitude without justice is a source of evil.”—St. Thomas Aquinas The great moralists tell us that a person’s strength is often the source of his greatest weakness, whether it is business acumen, artistic creativity, or physical excellence. Any of these things can be exercised too much or in the wrong way. The same is true [...]