Grace and I had the pleasure of chatting yesterday about her newly released book, Ask Of Old Paths, the legacy of medieval virtues and vices, and what it would take to recover the notion of virtue and vice in the modern world.

Grace’s book is well worth the read for any number of reasons: the way it opens up the medieval world in its weirdness and beauty; the bibliography it carefully unpacks; the accessible treatment of virtue that it offers for novice and seasoned readers alike. But one of the things which struck me about her book as a whole was simply how virtue invites us to a very different world.

Virtue—as durable traits, movements in the soul—invites us to a slower, almost heterodox world, in which the first things which we should attend to is our formation into the way and character of Jesus. Virtue thinks less in terms of “values” to be adopted—as if the moral life was simply slogans to be slung around, or worse, a new and boring kind of team sport. Virtue treats moral change as a kind of character which God helps us to put on, and the wellspring out of which a very different world might emerge.

I flub the interview straight out of the gate by mispronouncing her last name, but we go on. Enjoy the conversation, and go buy her book to help launch it into the world well.

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