Matthew Arbo. The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues. Baker Books, 2026. $19.99. 160 pp.
David Hein. Teaching the Virtues. Mecosta House, 2025. $24.95. 222 pp.
Alan Noble. To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times. InterVarsity Press, 2026. $24.99. 200 pp.
Zachary Wagner. Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World. Brazos Press, 2026. $19.99. 240 pp.
In reviewing Grace Hamman’s book on Medieval virtues for modern living last fall, Amy Mantravadi remarked on the popularity of books on the virtues of late. That is true. And yet, vices today are more publicly visible than ever, often masquerading as modern virtues of sorts.
One need only think of the many proud polyamory memoirs to have hit the shelves (with the enthusiastic promotion of magazines like The New York Times) over the past couple of years. Such books present what used to be called adultery as a newly proclaimed and lauded virtue—self-love. Now that recreational marijuana is legal in 24 states (and medical marijuana is legal in 40), the vice of illicit drugs has likewise been deemed acceptable. Porn use is legal and widespread—even among Christians. Abortion rates in America are only going up. Sports gambling is out of control. The only traditional vice possibly on decline is drinking—but cigar smoking is up to compensate.
I could keep going, but you get the point. The GLP-1 craze that is booming at this same moment is a reminder that we’re a society unable to control or reject our vices, much as we sometimes admit we should. At least with GLP-1 we have a classic secular modern scientific response to combating the vices that could kill us: just take a pill for it!
Alternatively—or in addition to taking a pill to lessen the effects of some of your vices—you could go to therapy and figure out ways to work harder on self-improvement, like the enlightened denizen of the twenty-first century that you are. Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan’s book Me, But Better is a good example of this genre. After realizing that her personality was at times rather trying on her friends and loved ones, Khazan decided to improve it—and for a year, she worked extremely hard at this task. Her book details her deliberate efforts for creating this better version of herself. As others who have tried such projects, she found that to some extent it does seem to work.
This relentless self-improvement in the spirit of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps has an all-American je-ne-sais-quoi about it (just ask Benjamin Franklin), but it’s also quite ancient. In the second century AD, Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations with a similar ethos—and it is telling that his book has been a bestseller throughout this first quarter of the twenty-first century so far. Not all ancient philosophers make sense to us today, but the Stoics’ valiant self-improvement project does.
Self-improvement in the vein of Marcus Aurelius or Franklin or Khazan isn’t a terrible idea per se. We all could use some of it at times. And for those who put their well-earned elbow grease into such projects, it all seems to work well for a while—but then it doesn’t, Alan Noble reflects in his new book on the virtues. After trying to optimize oneself, invariably people hit a wall at some point. A realization dawns: we cannot save ourselves. For Christians, this is, of course, a foundational theological truth. And yet, there’s also a sort of bewilderment, dismay, and lowkey despair that comes along with this realization—a despair from which even Christians are not fully immune.
What to do instead—and what does God have to do with it? Noble’s book and three other new books on the virtues that are covered in this review are examples of a more grounded, lasting response to timeless problems to which our age seeks quick-fix answers. All four consider the virtues not as Marcus Aurelius-style self-improvement endeavors but as part of a life-long journey of growing closer to God and becoming more Christ-like in the process.
The virtues begin in the classroom, with the formation of children. The classroom may be at home or in a formal school setting—especially, as Hein considers, in Classical schools. For Hein, every aspect of education—the what, the how, the when, the why—is inextricably connected to the moral formation of persons: “Education is more about developing the habits—the particular, the moral traits—of a good life than it is about delivering content, as important as knowledge is.”
Exemplars of virtues and vices play a central role in this vision for education—and these may be historical, literary, or even from film. At the same time, the very process of learning trains students in the virtues. To read long books is to train one’s attention span and diligence. To solve increasingly more difficult math problems teaches perseverance—and shows that it’s not just about a quick fix, the solution, but about following a lengthy process well.
Most significant, learning to love the right things and in the right order—with God above all—trains persons to dwell peacefully and virtuously with others. This is an essential skill both for marriage eventually and for being a functional adult and citizen in the world, no matter one’s professional vocation. Ultimately, Hein reflects, the best Classical education treats students as persons and sees human flourishing in harmony with God and fellow man as the telos of education.
Alan Noble, a long-time college professor and writer, certainly agrees with Hein on the goals of education and the need for students to grow in the virtues. In his new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, he walks readers through different situations in life that require us to exercise the virtues—always with an eye to Christ.
The virtue of justice is essential for dwelling in peace with others. And the virtue of prudence is needed for making good decisions—and we all have myriad decisions to make in our lives, some less momentous than others. But also, Noble wisely notes, sometimes you make the wrong decision—e.g., go into a career or a job for which you’re ill suited. For the prudent whose identity firmly rests in Christ, however, this too will be okay at the end.
What about the typical lack of restraint in our society, which so often leads to vices? Noble reflects: “For many of us, temperance will be the most challenging of all the virtues to practice because it is the one most vehemently opposed by society and our economy.” Everything, in other words, is marketed to distract us and make us covet things we never thought we needed, but temperance keeps us focused on things eternal—“it is true freedom, for without godly limits to guide us, we are lost and anxious, wandering from one unfulfilling desire to the next.”
Life under the sun is uncertain and anxiety-provoking, Ecclesiastes reminds—and then you die. But life for those who put on the virtues of Christ is grounded in the one in whose image we are made.
We are all affected by life in a vice-filled society. But Christian men today face additional challenges to growing in character and the virtues. Bombarded increasingly with warped images of violent masculinity, they also struggle in schools, at work, and in relationships. In his new book, Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World, Zachary Wagner begins with a consideration of the three revolutions that have led to our modern crisis of masculinity—the Industrial Revolution, the Sexual Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. For men, all three were deeply disruptive. It seems that men never recovered from one when another one compounded the harm yet further.
In response to these cultural crises, Wagner wrote his book as a tool for “virtue formation in men, a book about how men ought to live in light of the gospel. It is an attempt to offer a biblical answer, specifically for men and boys, to the question of how we ought to live.” This is a topic about which Wagner has been thinking for a long time—the present book is a logical sequel to his previous book, Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality.
A key problem afoot is one of role models in society and in the church. Men are increasingly being shaped by influencers and celebrities—and the result is not good. Instead, “Biblical masculinity is the pursuit of Christian virtue in a male body, enabling a Christian man to live into his true identity as a servant and son of God.” And so, Wagner looks to the fruit of the spirit from Galatians 5:22-23 as the quintessential virtues of Christ-like masculinity. “No, Really, Jesus Was Meek,” insists the title of one chapter in the book, in the section on Gentleness—perhaps the most difficult masculine virtue to sell in the days of Pete Hegseth and the Tate brothers.
We all live as part of stories, but what kind of stories are they? So wonders ethicist and political policy advisor Matthew Arbo in opening his new book, The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues. The point to which he is getting is the disappearance of the virtues of mainstream discourse—reflecting the decline in any interest in the virtues in our society aside from particular circles:
One of the primary reasons virtue has dropped from contemporary moral discourse is because it supposes the existence of some good to which human life is rightly ordered. This transcendent good—‘transcendent’ in the sense that it is not up to us whether it exists or what it requires—is universal. It is everyone’s good—all persons, past and future. It is all-encompassing, and just for that reason it has been rejected by a strident modern sensibility that favors personal independence. The modern person wants to say that there is no universal good for human life, and therefore everyone must choose their own purpose or end. As a result, everyone may decide what flourishing means for them.
Public discourse is blighted as a result of this relativist vision, Arbo is convinced. His book is a call to recover the virtues and repair our culture as we become formed into the image of Christ through pursuing the virtues. Arbo opens each chapter with prayer, because growing in the virtues is not just an intellectual exercise, but a spiritual one.
We desperately need virtuous neighbors—and we should be those virtuous neighbors for others too. Of course, we still live in a fallen world, so “Becoming virtuous will not solve all of our own or society’s problems,” he cautions. But it will give us a newfound hope and a better narrative to live by as we weather the challenges of life in this disordered world. “A consequence of virtue is friendship, and a consequence of friendship is virtue,” he notes in conclusion. We are not islands unto ourselves, after all. Part of the flourishing life is flourishing together with others—family, friends, community, church, and more.
The bad news is there’s still no pill to take to make one a better person. The virtues are, for the Christian, part of life-long sanctification—the process of growing ever more like Christ, even as this journey will never be complete in this mortal coil.
In other words, we desperately need the virtues—and our society, as Arbo reminds, desperately needs virtuous citizens. Society doesn’t just happen on its own, after all. Still, we will never fully embody the virtues in this life—just ask all the Desert Fathers and Mothers who continued to struggle with sin even after decades of pursuing saintly lives in the desert, away from regular temptations. But this is not the final word, Noble reminds: “The end of all virtues is love, and the manifestation of love from God toward us is grace. By grace God created us. By grace he sustains us. By grace he saved us. While it is beautiful and good to pursue these virtues, they neither save us nor define our worth. When God looks upon us, he sees the righteousness of his Son and is pleased. We live by grace.”
The virtues are not a substitute for God’s grace, but Christians have long used the language of virtues to expand their imagination of sanctification and for thinking about how to be Christ-like in a world that would rather tell us we’re fine as we are—or, as Freya India shows in her new and devastating book, Girls, would rather strip us down for parts and sell us an imaginary best new version of ourselves. But God’s answer today, just as two millennia ago, is to call us back into a loving relationship with him, and to be shaped by the love of things eternal.