Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St Joseph.

I teach the Dominican House of Studies and what else do I do? I work as an assistant director for the

Tomistic Institute and this is Pines of the

Quinas. In this episode, I want to talk about what it means to be sober. I

realize that when many of you hear that, you think of people who struggle with

alcoholism, who have been through a period of recovery

and now typically don't drink alcohol at all so we associate being sober with tea

totaling or abstaining entirely from alcohol but But in the classical conception, it means

something different. In order to appreciate how and why that matters, we're going

to have to get into it though. Here we go. Okay, so you have probably observed many

authors before all of us have observed that the notion of virtue is kind of slipping.

It used to be something that signified a kind of strength or a power to perform action in

accord with our human end, which kind of facilitates our

human flourishing, but it's come to sound somewhat stodgy or to sound somewhat

fussy and we can see this with particular Christian virtues.

So, for instance, I like to talk about this

with respect to the virtue of charity.

Charity in the Christian understanding

is big and bold and beautiful, but in our contemporary understanding we associate charity with giving things to people who have less means or just to poor people simply so-called. But I don't think many of us like to be

on the receiving end of charity because it represents a kind of ugly need like we

don't want to be made a charity case. Here we see the notion of the virtue

slipping such that whereas formally it signifies a kind of strength, a kind of

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