Quotes from Vigen Guroian

I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.

Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil's will is coerced. Instead a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination.

I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends.

A true gardener would never pretend that gardening is all pleasure, or that it always prompts reflection. But she might claim that in the garden she has tasted Paradise.

the best sources in the Western tradition have argued that morality is much more than, indeed qualitatively different from, the sum of the values that an essentially autonomous self chooses for itself. Classical, Jewish, and Christian sources, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, or Augustine, John Chrysostom, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, insist that morality is neither plural nor subjective.

Sailors need to know when to use ballast or throw down the anchor, lest the ship sink and they drown. In like manner, the virtues enable us to respond correctly to those moments of life that are the moral equivalents to such conditions at sea.

My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind or spirit, we are our bodies - cruising the Internet won't teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming, I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools.

Gardening symbolizes our race's primordial acceptance of a responsibility and role in rectifying the harm done to the creation through sin.

The fruit of the garden is not restricted to what we eat. Every garden lends something more to the imagination - beauty.

Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man's Garden, observes that it is not important for a garden to be beautiful in everyone's eyes. But it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden. Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth.

A person has to grow as a moral self in order to transcend this childlike subjectivity and primitive narcissism.

Children are vitally concerned with distinguishing good from evil and truth from falsehood. This need to make moral distinctions is a gift, a grace, that human beings are given at the start of their lives.

I do not think that the current debate over values lends much promise of clarifying what we believe in or what morality we should be teaching our children. Values certainly are not the answer to moral relativism. Quite the contrary, values talk is entirely amenable to moral relativism. In

A Bela e a Fera" ensina a lição simples, mas importante de que as aparências podem enganar e aquilo que é visto nem sempre é o que parece ser.

valores certamente não são a resposta para o relativismo moral. Muito pelo contrário, a mera discussão sobre valores já favorece o relativismo moral.

The color orange is both a quality of an orange and an inescapable description of it. If we find an object, however, that looks like an orange but is brown, it must either be an orange that has gone bad or it is not an orange at all. Similarly, it makes no moral sense to say that a courageous man has decided to be a coward.

That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child."11

But if we pay heed to the ancient sources, we will recognize that the virtues are related to a much thicker and deeper moral reality. We will see the virtues as the qualities of character that we need in order to steer our way through the complicated and mysterious sea of morality into which we all have been placed. For such journeying a pocketful of values is neither sufficient ballast nor a substitute for sails, compass, or sextant. C

The virtues define the character of a person, his enduring relationship to the world, and what will be his end. Whereas values, according to their common usage, are the instruments or components of moral living that the self chooses for itself and that the self may disregard without necessarily jeopardizing its identity.

A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. Stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education—that is, the education of character. The

The deep truths of a good story, especially fairy tales, cannot be revealed through discursive analysis—otherwise, why tell the story?

religious and philosophical ethicists have not reflected much on children as moral learners or written much on the virtues as taught and communicated in children's stories. Perhaps this is because, like so many others, ethicists too subscribe to the falsehood that childhood is more about socialization than moral formation.

We are living in a culture in which metaphor is discarded for these so-called facts. We train minds to detect these facts much as one breaks in a baseball glove. Meanwhile, the imagination is neglected and is left unguarded and untrained. W

Crianças precisam de orientação e roteiros morais, beneficiando-se imensamente com o exemplo de adultos que falam a verdade e agem com força moral.