ABSTRACT
This chapter presents basic dispositions and virtues that parents may learn and learn to teach their children. Parents teach their children to be joyful. If parents have received their lives as a divine gift and, more to the point, welcomed their children as wondrous and astonishing gifts, then their readiness for gratitude should not be an alien disposition. Parents, looking at life not as a gift but as seductive and threatening, might teach children these things in order to protect them. Parents may teach their children to be faithful, loyal to God and the neighbour God loves. To be faithful means, among other things, to keep covenant with persons to whom one is bound, not only by choice but by circumstances, history, and nature. The patient person abides vigilantly in the presence of suffering, injustice, and many other ways in which the good is vitiated. People are tempted either to be overcome by evil or blithely to discount its threats.
