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🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Prof. Timothy J. Pawl examines the nature, divisions, and cultivation of virtue, harmonizing Christian moral wisdom with contemporary psychological research and offering eight practical steps to growing in virtue.
This lecture was given on April 24th, 2025, at North Dakota State University.
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About the Speaker:
Timothy J. Pawl is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and holds a Ph.D. from Saint Louis University in philosophy. He specializes in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, Thomistic philosophy, analytic theology, and moral psychology. His books include In Defense of Conciliar Christology (Oxford, 2016), In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology (Oxford, 2019), The Incarnation (Cambridge, 2020), and Jesus and the Genome: The Intersection of Christology and Biology (Cambridge, 2024), co-authored with a philosopher of science and an evolutionary biologist.
Keywords: Aristotelianism, Augustine, Cardinal Virtues, Christian Moral Wisdom, Habit Formation, Intellectual Virtues, Nicomachean Ethics, Self-Control, Situational Self-Control, Theological Virtues
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0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
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0:22.5 | to mystic institute.org. So we're going to talk tonight about how to be a little less awful. Not a, |
0:28.6 | not a big goal, a kind of a small goal, being a little less awful. You can work for extra credit |
0:33.7 | at being a lot less awful if you'd like to. I'm not going to stop you. But for me, |
0:44.0 | a little bit at a time. Here are the four things I want us to do. I'm going to talk about just what a virtue is. I'm thinking of virtues as being the ways in which we get better, get less |
0:52.4 | awful. So if virtue is the goal, the thing we're aiming at to get better, |
0:56.9 | we've got to figure out what it is that we're aiming at. So it makes sense that we should ask |
1:00.0 | first and foremost just what is this thing called virtue that we're looking for? We'll talk also |
1:06.1 | about some divisions among the virtues. You've probably heard of the four cardinal virtues. |
1:10.6 | Maybe the three theological virtues. There's intellectual heard of the four cardinal virtues. Maybe the three |
1:11.1 | theological virtues. There's intellectual virtues too. We'll talk about all these and what divides |
1:16.5 | them from one another. What makes a cardinal virtue different than a theological virtue? |
1:21.6 | The third thing I want to talk about is some corroboration you find between Christian moral wisdom, like what the |
1:30.3 | church fathers were teaching in the desert, what the schoolmen were saying in the medieval |
1:34.3 | era, what those people were saying about habit formation and growth on the one hand, and on |
1:39.3 | the other hand, contemporary psychological data about how best to habituate yourself and grow in a virtue, |
1:45.0 | how to inculcate a stable disposition. |
1:47.0 | We'll find, I think, strong corroboration between what was said in ages past by Christian moral wisdom |
1:55.0 | and what's said now today by contemporary psychology. |
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