Descripción
The thesis has three parts. The first part describes an Ignatian approach. Here, I explore how St. Ignatius of Loyola’s famous four-week spiritual retreat, The Spiritual Exercises, provides: a graced encounter with God, reflection on the nature of one’s discipleship, and an opportunity for conversion to its retreatants. In particular, I show how the Spiritual Exercises are
conducive in helping direct someone to individual and social transformation in Christ. The second part examines how virtue ethics calls a person to consider amending his/her life in light of that transformation. Insofar as my method relies on virtue for its content, it will be important to explore what virtue is and how it functions for an individual. I will pay particular attention to the virtue of prudence as it is the director of the other virtues, engaging a particular virtue in a particular moment as right reason about what needs to be done. Prudence understands the context
of a given situation and calls on other virtues to supply content for an action. Thus as prudence is
only understood through an examination of another virtue, I will also present as an example of the virtue of hospitality in order that prudence might be better understood. The virtue of hospitality is important for this work as it is the virtue I will use to demonstrate the method in the
third and final part of my thesis. In this last section, I will present my five-step Ignatian
Approach to Virtue Education, note its limitations, and then observe some of the similarities and differences it has to Shared Christian Praxis and the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm.
Universidad
Boston College, Brighton, Massachusetts,