The Good Life

In Sources of the Self, his magesterial synthesis of moral sensibilities in western philosophy, Charles Taylor criticizes the narrow focus of contemporary moral philosophers. They have "tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life." As a result, their work "has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance." "This philosophy," says Taylor, "has accredited a cramped and truncated view of morality."
Taylor aims to restore the notion of the good, largely by retrieving the sources by which it has been known. Over 500 dense pages later, he concludes,

We have read so many goods out of our official story, we have buried their power so deep beneath layers of philosophical rationale, that they are in danger of stifling. Or rather, since they are our goods, human goods, we are stifling.
The intention of this work was one of retrieval, an attempt to uncover buried goods through rearticulation--and thereby to make these sources again empower, to bring the air back again into the half-collapsed lungs of the spirit.

We envision a similar quest. Our book will be much easier to read than Taylor's, and it will be more theological than philosophical. But we, too, write for those who need to breathe. And, like Taylor, we do not propose new answers as much as we reclaim old ones, seeking the face of the One who is Good.