ABSTRACT
Passion and emotion have become secularised but this renders their power all the more unmanageable, and they become a new dark continent for psychoanalytic investigation. The author shares something of her own reflection on how to respond to her buffered student and her needs as a priest and teacher. Her first aim for her student is to open his/her desire for wisdom: to offer a vision of the aim of education as knowledge of the true, the good and the beautiful. As a priest she is required to preach the gospel 'in season and out of season' and she thinks of this as akin to a mode of elenchus. The A level syllabus for Philosophy and Ethics contains a small section on virtue ethics: the moral tradition in relation to the role of the tutor. The whole of human religiousness is played out in the recognition that the single, total meaning of life resides in the mystery of God.
