A New Book

Why Faith is a Virtue

    For the most part, fall semester has limited my blog postings.  Each week I put up another chapter of Castles, and my supply of fresh material grows smaller.  That's the rhythm of a professor's life; during the semester I hustle to keep up with classes and administrative duties at George Fox.  This semester another factor has occupied my time--revising a new philosophy book.
    I specialize in that part of philosophy called virtue theory.  My dissertation was a book about love, entitled Learning to Love: Philosophy and Moral Progress.*  In 2002, I published The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics.  For several years since the civility book, I have been working on the virtue of faith.  In 07-08, George Fox granted me a sabbatical and I pulled my essays on faith into a book.  But then I couldn't get a publisher to accept it.  By 2009 I was convinced this failure to find a publisher was a blessing, because one of the chapters needed thorough revision.  In other words, it was simply wrong.
    By summer of 2012 I was ready to resubmit the book to publishers.  I proposed the project to Wipf & Stock (nice people who had published Being at Home in the World, a little book of Christian apologetics written by Mark McLeod-Harrison and me) and they snapped it up.  I'm very pleased about this; W&S plan to publish the book in their Cascade line, their top academic line of books.  Recently I've been reading Esther Meek's Loving to Know, an excellent book, and also a Cascade book.  If my book goes on the same shelf with Meek, I'm happy!
    I've been revising Why Faith is a Virtue all semester, mostly on Tuesday nights.  Now it's Christmas break, and I'm nearing the finish line.  The final text will go to Wipf & Stock before January 10.
    If all goes well, I'll write a few more chapters of Castles before classes resume.


*Some of you will remember the line from Don McLean's song, American Pie: "Did you write the book of love? Do you have faith in God above? Did the Bible tell you so?" For me, the answers are all yes. I did write a book of love!