Virtue and the Moral Life
Theological and Philosophical Perspectives
Contributions by Mark A. Wilson, Julie Hanlon Rubio, Lisa Tessman, Mary M. Doyle Roche, F. J. F. Keenan, Margaret Urban Walker, Jamie Schillinger, Jean Porter, Jennifer A. Herdt, Edmund N. Santurri Edited by William Werpehowski, Kathryn Getek Soltis
Not available to order
Publication date:
22 July 2014Length of book:
226 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739182321
The scope of interest and reflection on virtue and the virtues is as wide and deep as the questions we can ask about what makes a moral agent’s life decent, or noble, or holy rather than cruel, or base, or sinful; or about the conditions of human character and circumstance that make for good relations between family members, friends, workers, fellow citizens, and strangers, and the sorts of conditions that do not. Clearly these questions will inevitably be directed to more finely grained features of everyday life in particular contexts. Virtue and the Moral Life: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives takes up these questions. In its ten timely and original chapters, it considers the specific importance of virtue ethics, its public significance for shaping a society’s common good, the value of civic integrity, warfare and returning soldiers’ sense of enlarged moral responsibility, the care for and agency of children in contemporary secular consumer society, and other questions involving moral failure, humility, and forgiveness.
While many of the foremost voices in Christian virtue ethics are represented here, this collection strides beyond the ordinary by also including prominent philosophers and by pondering new or neglected matters, such as moral failure, moral grief, the virtue of civic integrity, and the liturgical pedagogy of virtue. This is an essential work for anyone interested in creative thinking about virtue theory today.