Love and Virtue in a Secular Age

Ralph C. Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University, where he teaches political philosophy. He has authored, edited, or translated many books and articles on the interrelation of religion, morality, and politics, including authoring The Responsibility of Reason and translating Pierre Manent's Natural Law and Human Rights.

"Ralph Hancock has given himself a most intimidating task: to recover human agency, with its accompanying confidence in the primacy of the Good. He convincingly shows why our post-Christian souls, in order to understand themselves, need a full and accurate engagement with the Christian proposition. This book is a major achievement." —Pierre Manent, author of Natural Law and Human Rights and Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference"Drawing on the best classical, Christian, and contemporary wisdom, Hancock brilliantly rescues Christian love from its thoughtless identification with mere sentimentality and shows that authentic virtue is inseparable from the proud cultivation of moral and political responsibility." —Daniel J. Mahoney, author of Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul"Is pride the root of sin or a spur to virtue? With careful attention to Christian theology as well as political philosophy, Ralph Hancock guides the reader through this question and offers a bracing defense of political liberty against progressive humanitarianism." —James R. Stoner, author of Common-Law Liberty"It would be one thing for Hancock merely to anatomize the secular cult of victimhood. . . . But here Hancock goes further, engaging with thinkers from Aquinas and Tocqueville to Leo Strauss and Pierre Manent to point toward a 'practical ethics' for the postmodern age—one that prizes man's yearning for transcendence while respecting the quotidian, necessarily imperfect means of his getting there." —The New Criterion

• PrefaceIntroductionPart One1. The Failures of Theory and Theology2. Manent: Towards the Truth of Practice3. From the Politics of Fear to the Religion of Humanity4. Christianity and the Progress of Liberalism5. Strauss's Response to the Victory of Universalism: On TyrannyPart Two6. Liberty Within a Christian (or Post-Christian) Horizon7. Pierre Manent's Christian Aristotelianism8. The Grammar of Action and its Eternal ResonancePart Three9. The Same and the Other: Western Configurations of Transcendence10. The Claims of Subjectivity and the Limits of Politics11. Analogy, Virtue, and Politics12. Christianity and the Truth About ManConclusionBibliography