What we’ve been up to: Excerpt of our report to Templeton

Chicago Cultural Center Chandelier and Tiffany Dome
Photo by Chris Smith.

Our project is funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation; the following is an excerpt of our last report to them, sent in January 2018.

We are on schedule for our Outputs and Outcomes. We held all 4 of our Working Group meetings, accompanied by 4 public lectures. We completed both Summer Seminars, and both Spring courses taught by Visiting Scholars, accompanied by their reading groups. Our Aristotle workshop, “Practical Truth: Reflections on the Aristotelian Tradition,” took place last April at the University of South Carolina. Our public Capstone conference was held October 14-15, 2017 at UChicago, along with two public keynote addresses. We are planning our April “Virtue and Corporate Life” event in partnership with the Booth School of Business. Frey’s podcast series on “Sacred and Profane Love” is being planned for a Spring deployment.

We surpassed our goal of 20 articles springing from the VHML project, with 22 articles and 3 books published or accepted. We will be or have been featured on KZUM radio Nebraska, BYU radio, London radio Newstalk 1290 CJBK, and in the Daily Nous, Philosopher’s Magazine, Quartz, Inside Philanthropy, The University of Chicago Daily Maroon, Tableau, Tableau web extra, Virtue Insight, Suburban Living, and Chicago Catholic. Our outputs have been shared online by the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing, The Wisdom Center, The Jubilee Centre, Lumen Christi, the Hyde Park Institute, and the Thomistic Institute, as well as the University of Chicago, University of South Carolina, the Neubauer Collegium, the UChicago Divinity School, and Notre Dame Society for Ethics.

As of December 31, 2017, our website, virtue.uchicago.edu has had 22,541users and 66,051 page views. We have 4,168 page likes on Facebook, 664 followers on Twitter, 161 followers on Instagram, and 1495 views on Flickr. Our Virtue Blog was ranked one of the top “Happiness” blogs of 2017, with 48,782 visitors and 94,169 views.