Medieval Morality for Modern Sinners

As promised, my new blog.  Comments welcome!  Check out "About" as well as the first post on "Getting Medieval."  "Sources" will be added as they make themselves useful.

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On Pronouns, and Blowing Your Nose

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Back in the Middle Ages--according to J.S. Mill--it was possible to be an individual. Not. Any. More.

As Mill argued in his On Liberty(1859):
In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendent power among mankind.  In ancient history, in the middle ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power.  At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. Mill’s contemporary Jacob Burckhardt begged to disagree. Publishing his Die Cultur der Renaiss…
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“I will tell you the tale of Tinúviel,” said Strider, “in brief--for it is a long tale of which the end is not known...” It was not the thing that I expected to find most difficult about doing Professor Peterson’s Self-Authoring Present: Virtues and Faults.

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I have spent my life “self-authoring” in one guise or another. The diary that I …
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Virtue: Feel enough shame if I do something stupid so I won’t do it again

 Describe an experience: Please write a short story (approximately 1,000 characters) about a time in your life when this positive trait or virtue contributed to or created a situation that had a positive impact on your life.
I cheated on my first husband. (Ha! That got your attention.)

It was twenty-six years ago. I was young, as was my lover. We got married three years later, after waiting out the period during which according to the law in the U.K. I could ask for a divorce. We are still married now. But I did it. We did it. He was already married, too, but his wife sued for divorce immediately.

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Signal Virtue: Me, Myself, and I

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Virtue: Am comfortable alone

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What would Jesus do? Victorian pessimist and poet James Thomson (d. 1882) thought he knew.
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