The Virtue of Virtues

From the instructor of the parish CCD program looking for a virtue-based morality curriculum to the parent looking to teach or reinforce these concepts to children in the home, Linda Hourihan’s The Virtue of Virtues is the answer. The structure of this collection of sixth-grade lessons offers CCD teachers the flexibility of teaching one lesson each month during the CCD year or fitting the instruction into a seven-week block from October to December at the start of the CCD instructional year. Parents can also use this organized approach to teach virtues to their children in the comfort of their own homes without disrupting their own schedules and styles: one hour each night for a week, one lesson a week for a month, or one lesson a month for seven months. Led by Sly the Sleuth, Hourihan’s insightful and thought-provoking reporter, children search for and discover truth and morality in each lesson, while they learn how to apply the virtues to their daily lives. Hourihan stresses virtues are based on ethics and values “that move past the popular opinion of the day to a solid foundation of unchangeable virtues given to us by God, exemplified by Jesus, and bolstered by the Holy Spirit.” Parents asked Hourihan – a religious educator for 23 years and a reporter for 20 years – to write a book about teaching the Catholic faith and virtues to their children. She obviously took the challenge quite seriously, as demonstrated by her positive, informative, and entertaining THE VIRTUE OF VIRTUES.