Vol. 42, No. 02
02/01/2026
Sloth, Diligence, and Moral Clarity in the Post-Christian West
AT A GLANCE
• The American education system is a breeding ground for the Seven Deadly Sins.
• Sloth is one of the most popular contemporary sins, which is why it’s so hard to explain to modern people.
• Sloth can be countered with the virtue Diligence, as the ancients teach us.
• The next installment of this series will focus on the sin of Wrath and its opposite virtue, Patience.
The New American magazine presents this new bimonthly feature, “Culture Corner,” offering a deep focus on contemporary cultural issues viewed through the prism of history, art, literature, music, and theology. The goal is to recover and reinvigorate the moral and virtuous purposes of the humanities, long forgotten and compromised by materialist pedagogues and Marxist socialist ideologues in our schools and universities. In the famous description by the Roman poet Horace in Ars Poetica (19 B.C.), the ultimate ideal of humanistic learning is prodesse et delectare (to instruct and to delight). Down through the ages of Western culture, the purpose of humane letters has been the triumph of Truth and Beauty: truth to instruct us in morality and knowledge, and beauty to delight us with joy and gratitude. The inaugural Culture Corner series features a seven-article reflection on virtue and vice, from Classical and Christian sources going back to the Bible, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and through the Middle Ages to our own world. This is article two of seven; the first appeared in our December issue.
As an English professor who has taught at seven universities and colleges for more than three decades, there is a lot I can lament — and have lamented — about education in the postmodern world. On our campuses, from major research universities to small liberal-arts colleges, students in Western countries are exposed to a gamut of ideologies, theories, and highly politicized invective. And the more transgressive, salacious, materialistic, and anti-traditional the message, the more it bleeds into classes across disciplines, from the fine arts and humanities to math and science. This extreme ideological orthodoxy and progressive dogma in our colleges and public schools has transformed American educational institutions into uncontested sites of anti-Christian dialectic, traducing traditional virtue and creating breeding grounds for the Seven Deadly Sins.
In Western culture, the oldest universities have been around for almost a millennium, the work of Christian invention and faith, cathedrals of knowledge and study dedicated to the glory of God and the illumination of the human condition. Out of these unique and forward-thinking institutions emerged great works of theology, philosophy, humane arts and letters, and the rise of modern science. Over the space of a few centuries, they produced cultures that created the Renaissance, discovered America, and circumnavigated the globe. A few centuries after that came the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of individual liberty and prosperity.
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