Many of my readers know that, in one of the great cosmic ironies, I am principal organist for a Lutheran church. In my post, “Emptiness,” I wrote about the experience of playing the organ in an empty space, and the surprising way this emptiness prompted me to notice what I was doing. I wanted to […]

In a previous post, I put forward the notion of a “belief ecosystem,” intended to capture the idea that we live our lives in and through a variety of beliefs, both our own and those of others with whom we interact. Reflecting on this ecosystem, we realize that there are beliefs that harmonize with each […]

There are two distinctive features of Aristotle’s ethics that are useful for us, and it so happens they are also key to understanding Aristotle’s “science of happiness.” First, Aristotle focuses not on character as some fixed and immutable quality, like temperament. Rather, his emphasis is on the development of character through the deliberate cultivation of […]

According to Plato, moderation is about self-rule regarding our desires. Aristotle might take that in the direction of finding balance in and among our desires. But what are desires? Essentially, desires are impulses to act seeking a state of satisfaction. An individual desire needs moderation in the sense that we find the right balance — […]

I’ve been catching up after the winter storm in Texas, and I didn’t quite catch up enough to post last Sunday. So, today, I’m going to take a short detour and talk about excellences of mind and the traditional virtues. Some people have asked me why I don’t use the more common language of “intellectual […]

Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, I talked about humility as a balance between too much confidence, which produces deliberative arrogance, and too little confidence, which produces timidity. We can generally recognize the extremes when we see them (and especially when we encounter them in dialogue), but it’s a lot harder to […]