Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent...
Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between compe...
The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.
To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word pride has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the thin...
Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.
As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college deg...
Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate o...
Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with...
(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.
This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, ab...
Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out w...
I make honorable things pleasant to children." A teacher from Sparta
Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.
[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.
if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
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