Virtue, Happiness, and Purpose

Religion is not primarily morality. Morality is not primarily rules. These are two of the conclusions to draw from a new book about virtue by Fr. Basil Cole, published by the Catholic press TAN Books. Fr. Cole's book is essentially a simple and transparent exposition of Christian ethics. I'd wager, though, that many even among believers don't realize to what extent Christian ethics represents a very particular approach to the question of right action, one that differs from ways of thinking dominant in the modern world. Philosophers term the classic Christian approach "virtue ethics" and often contrast it with two other possible viewpoints, known respectively as consequentialism and deontology. Put simply, consequentialism says that what counts is the results of my action, while deontology (from the Greek deon, binding or obligation) says that what counts is following the right moral rules.

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Biblical Manuscripts

Great Isaiah Scroll, 202-107 B.C., facsimile :

The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947  and is the most complete of the DeadSea Scrolls found in the Qumran  Caves.  
The scroll was written on seventeen sheets of parchment, connected  into a scroll.  Differences between this scroll and the later Masoretic text  are mostly grammatical and spelling differences.
Both this scroll and the Codex Leningradensis are open to Isaiah 40:8: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our
God will stand forever." (ESV) Although the manuscripts were written over 1000  years apart, the Word of God had never changed.
Codex Leningradensis is the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament. This codex was found in Egypt and is
now at The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (formerly known as  Leningrad). 
The early Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowel pointings, chapters, or verses.   A group of scribes called the Masoretes, who
worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the 5th and 10th centuries, added vocalizations (vowels), accents, and a  textual apparatus to the Hebrew text.
 The version was finalized by Hebrew  scribe Aaron ben Asher in the early 10th ce.
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How Medievalists Are Restoring the Ancient Religious Text

A 1,750-year-old translation of Matthew's Gospel has yielded a new Bible chapter thanks to medievalist Grigory Kessel's work. According to IFLScience, the mysterious chapter was discovered using ultraviolet photography on manuscripts housed in the Vatican Library.

The remarkable discovery was made as part of the Sinai Palimpsests Project, a research initiative dedicated to recovering erased and overwritten texts from the 4th to 12th centuries CE.

Due to the scarcity of writing materials at the time, manuscripts were frequently repurposed, resulting in palimpsest manuscripts in which previous text was washed or scraped off before new content was added. 

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What can Virtue Ethics Teach Us About Modern Ethical Problems?

  The complexity of modern life makes ethics even more difficult. From new technologies like genome editing and artificial intelligence, to political turmoil and cultural conflict, knowing how to do the right thing is incredibly hard. Could it be that an ancient – indeed, arguably the very first – approach to ethics offers us a solution? This article will explore virtue ethics, its history, several of its key thinkers and its applicability to modern moral problems. Whether or not one becomes a virtue ethicist and believes in this way of doing ethics as a whole, virtue ethics offers a reconsideration of the implications of our character and the importance of developing it in the context of ethical theory.    

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