ABSTRACT
We return again to the question of what it means to live well. Is truth relative, as the postmodernists would have us believe? Is there something discernible that is objectively true in our nature? Are grand and beautiful ideas still important? We seek a toehold of certainty but we might be better served learning to be comfortable in the roiling surf. “We may be our own worst enemy,” we say, “but we are each other’s’ best hope.” There is, we say, a kind of human truth that is both grand and beautiful and changeable, and this human truth is on display in students’ examples of their heroes: generosity, authenticity, compassion and what we might call moral gravity.
