Abstract
Virtue, Augustine tells us, is a good habit consonant with our nature. Today there are many who believe we live in a time when virtue is in very short supply. This is a collection of essays by twelve authors who argue that everyone ought to pursue virtue in our age, and practise habits consonant with our nature. The editors are clear that Christianity should not simply boil down to ethics, but equally they believe that to live the Christian life we need to be virtuous. The editors are unapologetically Christian, seeking to offer a Christian view which embraces ethics and philosophical ways of thinking about our moral dilemmas. They argue Christians have a distinctive approach to the virtues, different from non-Christians. This means the order of the virtues and how each is understood differs, and additionally that Christians acknowledge certain virtues non-Christians do not. Various traditions and authors offer different ways of numbering the virtues, but this volume settles on eleven. Following 1 Corinthians 13:13, they are clustered under major headings of the three theological virtues: faith, hope and love. Faith comprises open-mindedness, wisdom and zeal; hope comprises contentment and courage; while love comprises compassion, forgiveness and humility. The editors overarching strategy is to clarify and reinforce a general sense of virtue, while challenging some common assumptions, with a view to achieving a genuinely Christian conception of these eleven virtues. On the whole, this strategy seems to work and holds the various authors together. Each chapter contains a description of a particular virtue with both a philosophical and Christian study, concluding with practical advice linking the virtue to spiritual formation. This allows each virtue to be studied to different depths, intellectually and spiritually. To help the reader, there are questions for reflection at the end of each chapter, making it suitable for individual or group study. The various authors have kept in touch with practical issues in their explorations, but this is also a demanding book and is very much a study book which assumes a fair base of knowledge of matters philosophical. The editors have produced an excellent volume for university and college level courses in Christian ethics, and will provoke good class discussion. The questions for reflection at the end of each chapter are much more accessible than the chapter texts themselves, which for the purposes of most church study groups makes it more of a good course leader book. A virtue lacking in the book is the absence of any data about the contributors, aside from the two editors. G.K Chesterton believed the modern world is not evil, and in some ways far too good. It is, he wrote, full of wild and wasted virtues. Yet, virtue seems very old-fashioned in our celebrity-soaked and scandalized era, and so this volume is a welcome reminder that there is much Christians can do to be good and promote virtue in the face of so much worldly cynicism.