You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I've achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul.

I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones.

But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light.

Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character. Continue reading

• David Brooks in The New York Times

David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist and the author, most recently, of "The Road to Character," from which this essay is adapted.

That's understandable.

The series at its dark heart is a study of good and evil, and more specifically about how good people can do bad things, how they become bad, or whether we all have a seed of evil within us that can germinate and run amok under the right conditions.

It is further proof that the series' drama is a profoundly religious one is the fact that theologically minded people are still fiercely disputing exactly what the ending meant, and what the series — and its anti-hero, Walter White — stood for in moral and metaphysical terms.

Is the chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-cooker an irredeemable monster? Or maybe he is just one of us — a struggling, middle-class worker bee who gets a diagnosis of lung cancer and, hearing how profitable the drug trade can be, uses his talents to concoct premium-grade drugs to make a quick score that will support his wife and children long after he's dead.

Certainly the ending was inevitable and unsurprising: White dies, as he had to.

The show's creator, Vince Gilligan, made it clear - yes, some held out hope over the course of five seasons — that "this story was finite all along.

It's a story that starts at A and ends at Z." But how Walt died, who he would take down with him — or spare — and whether he ended in a state of grace were burning questions for devotees of the series, as they are for all believers.

Eschatology, the study of our ultimate fate, is what all religious exploring points to. So do TV dramas.

"I want to believe there is some sort of cosmic balancing of the scales at the end of it all," Gilligan said last year.

"I'd just like to believe there's some point to it all. I'd like to believe that there is. Everything is just too random and chaotic absent that."

Not surprisingly, many who watched the finale saw a light at the end of the series for Walt.

One genius of the show (there were so many) is that it co-opted viewers into rooting for Mr. White-as Walt's co-conspirator Jesse Pinkman always called his onetime high school teacher-no matter how low he sank.

So despite the trail of carnage and ruined lives that Walt left behind, the hope that he would find grace at the end, that his death would somehow sanctify, was overpowering.

Critics as varied as Emily Bazelon in Slate and Allen St. John in Forbes declared that "Breaking Bad" was ultimately a "love story" because White managed to do what he set out to do in the first season: He found a way to provide for his family, and at the end he finally confessed his original sin in becoming the drug kingpin dubbed Heisenberg.

"I did it for me," as he tells his devastated wife, Skyler. "I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really ... alive."

Writer Sonny Bunch even saw Gilligan slyly turning White into Jesus Christ-the wounds in Walt's hand and side, his reference to the view of the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains, his "sacrificing himself to save the people he loved," his cruciform death pose.

White also "made peace with those who had wronged him and those he had wronged (one way or another) so as to prepare himself for the afterlife."

Well, "making peace" may be pushing it.

White actually used his intellectual gifts one last time to build a Rube Goldberg killing machine and orchestrate a bloody-if improbable, without divine aid-denouement that destroyed all his enemies.

"His moment of clarity at the end doesn't make up for all the hubris of Heisenberg," Bazelon wrote. "But it did mean I could wholeheartedly root for his scheme of revenge."

And that's the theological problem. Continue reading

A special issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics contains 31 commentaries on infanticide from a range of ethicists, some arguing it can be a moral action; others maintaining that even suggesting it is a vile stain on academic integrity.

Commenting on the argument that infanticide is morally no different from abortion, Christian blogger Dr Peter Saunders says "we can draw one of two conclusions from that — either we should embrace infanticide or stop doing abortions".

Continue reading

Every time I perform a moral act, I am building up my character, and every time I perform an unethical act, I am compromising my character.

A sufficient number of virtuous acts, in time, shapes me in such a way that I can predictably and reliably perform virtuously in the future, and a sufficient number of vicious acts can misshape me in such a way that I am typically incapable of choosing rightly in the future.

This is not judgmentalism; it is a kind of spiritual/moral physics, an articulation of a basic law.

We see the same principle at work in sports. If you swing the golf club the wrong way enough times, you become a bad golfer, that is to say, someone habitually incapable of hitting the ball straight and far. And if you swing the club correctly enough times, you become a good golfer, someone habitually given to hitting the ball straight and far.

John Paul put his finger on a problem typical of our time, namely, that people think that they can do lots of bad things while still remaining, deep down, "good persons," as though their characters are separable from the particular things that they do.

Continue reading The acts we perform; the people we become

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• Image: Teamaltman.com

Humans share a common nature and possess common ways of acting. This comes about because our minds function according to a similar mechanism, and because we have comparable needs. The mechanism is this: where we have discretion, we make choices based on our values. This is called subjective valuation.

If I had a nickel for every time a person argued that this means that economics does not accept the idea of objective values, I could buy a candy bar (since the currency is so inflated). While it may be true that some economists do not believe in objective values, the existence of objective values has little bearing on the analysis of choices. People make choices based on the values that they subjectivize, whether they are objectively better or not.

Take the case of Michelangelo's statue of Moses. Very few people would deny that this statue is, objectively speaking, a powerful and impressive sculpture. Yet some tourists in Rome have no understanding of art, and if asked would not want to spend their time admiring that statue; based on their subjective valuation of art, it isn't on their list of priorities. This in no way undercuts the objective power of Michelangelo's work.

And this is just one of countless possible examples. When you eat cereal for breakfast and are confronted with a number of different brands, you choose the one you like best, based on what you value. If you are trying to live a healthful life, you might choose the box whose contents look like rabbit pellets. If taste is more important to you, that will be the basis of your choice, and you may opt for the sugary, chocolate cereal.

Economics is a science about persons and their actions, not about whether they should or should not make certain specific choices — that task belongs to ethics or moral theology. Nor does economics focus on the interior workings of the mind; that is for psychology. As individual persons, and as believers, economists are concerned about all of these things, of course. But as economists, the study of moral theology, ethics, and psychology falls outside their discipline.

Continue reading the article on Economics not being a business science.

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• Image: Blog - Journey of a social entrepreneur

Speaking at the London School of Economics he said that while some were seeking a change of culture, as a group the financial sector had failed to reform itself.

"Until a different culture has taken hold, I cannot see how a real and necessary change can take place," he said.

In his lecture "Good Life in Hard Times" he said the market, the state and society all exist to serve humanity and the common good.

Nichols argued strongly in favour of religious freedom, saying that it helped a thriving civil society and "increases our capacity to do good in the public square" and maintained that a society of many faiths, such a Britain, had a chance to export a new model of tolerant pluralism.

"Britain is a remarkable test case. We are living in a crucible in a global experiment of religious co-existence," he said. "In this country we have the opportunity, through the greater acceptance of the positive role of religion, to exemplify and perhaps export a new model of tolerant religious pluralism."

The archbishop argued that religious voices should not be excluded, but should not be given special privilege, either.

He said: "The mature and enlightened secular square should echo to the sound of many faiths, in dialogue with one another and with secular protagonists to the enrichment of all."

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Good Life in Hard Times - Archbishop Nichols speech and Podcast
Source: Catholic Herald
Image: Catholic Church in England and Wales (Flickr)