It's a pleasure for me to be here with you on this beautiful Saturday afternoon for this conference on virtue and moral character, according to St. Thomas Aquinas.

I want to tell you that I was initially scheduled to give this lecture last February, last year, and then there was a blizzard.

And so it was postponed to this year. So I already had most of my

notes ready of what I would say today. But then we went through 2016. And so after, that's why in my

outline, the very first bullet point is pessimism. So after a rather divisive year,

and I would say a very divisive election, I think that there is a lot of pessimism in the

air. We certainly experienced that through 2016. I know I certainly did. And there's a lot of

pessimism in the culture, in our country, and there has

been for a long while on a whole host of issues.

I mean, there are all sorts of divisions and disputes that

divide friends and families.

My conference today obviously isn't going to change

that. I have going to change that.

I have no illusions of that.

But I hope that our time together this afternoon might point to the locus of the disputes,

what I think grounds them, and somehow to offer you a classical,

tomistic understanding of how to move beyond them and good character.

Specifically, this afternoon, I'd like to spend some time discussing the nature of morality

and the moral standpoint, or the nature of moral character, from the moral standpoint of St. Thomas Aquinas,

which it will be obvious is not the view that most people operate with today.

Let's face it, the moment you begin to speak about morality,

at dinner or over cocktails, or with friends,

...