Old Books with Grace

Avarice and Generosity: Lent 2022

Today I talk avarice and generosity. Let’s begin with something really important that you probably would not know from looking at the lives of most Christians: scripture contains more warnings about money than about sex. Avarice, or covetise, as medieval English authors often called it, is the umbrella term for a whole host of disordered attitudes about money and acquisition. Let's explore further into something that likely afflicts each and every one of us...

Sloth and Strength: Lent 2022

Sloth is probably not what you think it is. It really has almost nothing to do with potato chips and couches and reality television. Sloth instead is a spiritual vice afflicting our willingness to do hard things in the service of love. The gift of strength and the virtues of constancy and perseverance are opposed to it. Listen in and learn about the most misunderstood of the vices.

Wrath and Its Remedies: Lent 2022

Anger is tricky. It can be good or bad, depending on its provocation and its expression. Because of that complexity, it does not have one clear remedy in the medieval tradition. So we talk patience, meekness, "evenhead," even the gift of knowledge. Alongside medieval writers, Grace explores the balance of feeling feelings and learning righteous anger, and rejecting hatred and wrath.

Envy and Love: Lent 2022

Envy is the only vice with no pleasure. All the others have a wickedly delicious flavor initially, but envy is embarrassing, and in it, we despise others and we despise ourselves. Grace unpacks this unsavory vice and its remedy, the answer to its deepest lack, love.

Pride and Humility: Lent 2022

In the first real episode of the Lent Seven Capital Vices series, meet the Queen of the Vices, Pride, and the foundation of the virtues, Humility. Hear from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Jane Austen, moral philosophers and theologians of today, and several medieval manuals on pride and humility, on self-deception and self-knowledge, presumption and arrogance, childlikeness and good pride, and more...

Introducing the Vices and Virtues: Lent 2022

In this introductory episode to the 2022 Lent series, Grace dives into the history and meaning of the Seven Capital Vices, their remedies, and their timeliness for Lent. What’s this ancient way of thinking about human behavior worth to us today, when we have so much new and wonderful information on human behavior in general? What even is a vice or a virtue, strictly speaking?! Let's find out.

Contemplative Reading and Thomas Merton with Sophfronia Scott

Grace welcomes Sophfronia Scott, author of The Seeker and the Monk, and director of the MFA creative writing program at Alma College. Sophfronia and Grace discuss learning to have meaningful dialogue with books as you read, even when they were written by long-dead writers, and Sophfronia shares her wisdom on reading Thomas Merton and on the practice of reading contemplatively.

Twentieth-Century Literature and Holiness with Jessica Hooten Wilson

This week, Grace welcomes Jessica Hooten Wilson to Old Books With Grace, to chat about her new book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints, and the power of literature to reveal the subtleties of the good life. Sometimes holiness can be alarming, bizarre, and fascinating... and novels and their novelists, like Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, can help us to conceptualize the holy life in all its difficulty and otherworldliness.