It’s Time to Recover Emotion in Religion

As a teacher at a classical school, I have the honor of stirring up in my students a love for the transcendentals. I have found the best way to inspire in them a commitment to the good is to first get them to fall in love with goodness. They will not love it simply because I tell them they should (as if that’s a good tactic for getting a teenager to do anything). Instead, the goal is to give them a personal encounter with the beauty of virtue. Once they have become captivated with Socrates’ commitment to truth; once they have lamented the death of a beloved literary character; once they read a line of poetry over and over again simply because it delights them, only then will they care about the realities these works are pointing to. Then they will fall in love with virtue. Why? Because we have taught them to delight in it.