The Crisis of Morality (and Importance of Christian Virtue) with Alan Noble

Well, your new book, To Live Well, is on virtue, which is specifically Christian virtue.

That's a pretty hot topic right now.

I feel like there's a lot of people writing about it and talking about it.

What is going on in our world to cause this, do you think? Why are people speaking about this right now? And what made you want to write about it?

Yeah, I think it answers the same question.

And so I think what's going on is that there are a lot of people who are, there are a lot of voices speaking into the world, conflicting messages, particularly to young people, telling them how to live, right? To speak to the title of my book.

And this gives them what I call a heap of broken images to to give an allusion to T.S. Eliot.

And this creates all kinds of anxiety and confusion and frustration for young people because they're not sure how to live.

So for example, what does it mean to live a just life, right? Especially starting in 2020, there were so many people talking about social justice, but what is justice, right? Right.

um love is another word that gets thrown around what is love you know is is love just an emotion that you feel is love whatever whatever you know you've you think it is uh what is love really um so all of these words have all have so much power social power behind them and emotional power behind them but you're getting different conflicting messages from the world and i One philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman, or a sociologist I think he is, calls this liquid modernity.

And so it's this idea that everything is shifting under our feet.

It's liquid.

Instead of having stability, everything is shifting.

Well, that's a very anxious way to live.

You feel uncertain.

You feel anxiety.

You feel frustration.

You feel confused.

And so you're going to reach out for something.

You're going to reach out for something.

Now, what the virtues do is they offer you a way of living, a way of navigating the world that is rooted in something that is deeper than just here's Alan's seven steps for living the best life, right? Yeah.

And what I try to do is I'm grounding these virtues, not just in the classical world, but in the gospel, right? In the gospel and in the word, so that there's this grounding in something that is deeper, that is richer, that is truer than even just classical tradition.

And so I think the appeal is that young people in particular, but... older people as well, they want something because there's a cacophony of voices that are telling them, here's how to live in a time when there's just no social standards.