Martin Luther King Jr. was an unfaithful husband and a plagiarist, Abraham Lincoln shared many of the prejudices of his time, and many of the women who lead the charge for suffrage in America were vocally racist. There is almost no figure so revered that we can’t find some fault, major or minor, in their character. This is the human condition. And yet human beings also need people to look up to. We seem to need people in our lives, in our history, in our public life, who we can model ourselves after. Moral growth often depends on moral examples. We need an image of who to be so that we know what to strive for. In a time where we are so aware of human weakness there is a temptation toward cynicism. How do we think about the complicated nature of our heroes, how do we evaluate people who lived in different times, and how do we find moral examples in a broken world?



For more, visit www.lyceummovement.org