Love is a virtue and not a feeling. It is fed and fired by God--not by the favorable response of the beloved. Even when it doesn't seem to make a dime's worth of difference to the ones on whom it is lavished, it is still the most prized of all virtues because it is at...
Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.
…when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtue; in which we have nothing to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support...
When we think about the Annunciation, this scene between the angel Gabriel and Mary, we think of the faith it took for her to believe that she would conceive by the power of the Holy Spirit and that her son, the illegitimate child of an insignificant girl, really...
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power, as no nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand...
If it [our framing story] tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little...
If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is...
Who stands fast? Only the person whose final standard is not his or her reason, principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God--the...
Public good doesn't automatically follow from private virtue. A person's moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the cause of justice, which is to challenge the status quo, to try to make what's legal more moral, to speak truth to power,...