This month, when we spotlight the virtue of generosity, let’s also train eyes on generosity’s natural ally:  hospitality.   As families prepare to welcome relatives, friends, and strangers into their homes, we can help kids understand that the December holidays are not just a time to party, but a time to open our hearts and homes to the needs of others, to be a host and take joy in putting our guests first. AND let’s talk with kids about being good guests too.

Hospitality, the friendly reception of guests or strangers into one’s home, has ancient roots.  Early Bedouin peoples, who were always on the move, enshrined the virtue of hospitality in the Middle East.  Offering shelter, water, finest food and drink, even music and stories to the traveling guest, was a feature of both ancient Sumerian and ancient Egyptian lore.  Biblical sources repeat the theme.  Ancient Greeks considered hospitality (philoxenia – “love of the stranger”) not just an option but a duty. In medieval times, Benedictine monks enshrined “hospitality” as one of their vows; they hastened to provide food and shelter to pilgrims on the move.

So, as we deck out our homes, bake our cookies, put on the holiday music, and prepare to welcome guests, it’s a good time to remind ourselves and our children what it means to be a good host … and a good guest.  When we extend hospitality, we are first and foremost thinking about the guest.  We strive to create a welcoming space for the other.  Our objective is to make guests feel appreciated and special.  

What should we teach kids about how to do that? It starts with getting ready: we prepare by providing a clean and possibly festive space, an area in which our company will feel welcomed.  Maybe that means tidying up a play space or setting the table in a special way.  When guests arrive, in the northern hemisphere at this time of year, it involves offering to take their coats and perhaps a bench to sit on to remove their boots.  Then it’s about welcoming them into our home, letting the guests go first, and making them comfortable in the space in which we plan to entertain.

By custom we offer guests a special drink or snack to welcome them. Then it's about sharing—learning about their lives, telling our stories, pursuing a common activity, whether a meal, conversation, card game, carols or karaoke.  If you’re dining together, guests often have a special seat at the table.  We can teach kids to clear the places of the guests at the end of the meal.  When the guests leave, help them gather their belongings and always thank them for coming.

Are there rules for gracious guests?  Yes, indeed.  The host does not expect payback but can expect good manners.  The good guest gratefully accepts the hospitality offered and doesn’t ask for something different unless a physical allergy is involved (and then with apologies).  The good guest always finds a way to express appreciation to the host for the meal or party or entertainment they’ve provided.  And the good guest participates in events with gusto, responding eagerly to overtures of conversation and activity, contributing from their interests and experience.  “Sharing” is not just about the host inquiring into the life and activities and needs of the newly arrived, but also about the guest seeking to better understand his/her hosts and contribute to a convivial environment with their own stories.  Good guests leave the home of the host in good order (unless the host doesn’t really want them to help with dishes, which is common), and with many expressions of gratitude.

In December, teachers can role play these situations with their class, having half the class be “guests” for lunch one day, and the other half act as “hosts.”  Then switch it the next day.  Who’s taking the coats?  Who’ll show the guest to their seats?  Who’ll serve the drinks and meal?  How should the guests express appreciation?  The class can also brainstorm how they can help their parents with the entertaining they are about to do:  tidying the house, putting up the decorations, setting the table, putting guest towels in the guest bathroom, and much more.    

In Genesis, Abraham rushes out to meet three strangers who approach his tent and offers them hospitality.  The ancient Jewish patriarch turns out to be "entertaining angels unaware" and is blessed by them.  In our lives, when we discover the joy of opening our hearts and home to others and when we express gratitude toward those who honor us with their hospitality, the holidays come to life in a new way.
​
Mary Beth Klee

​​When the Ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to Scrooge on that eerie Christmas Eve, the frightened miser noted that he could see right through him, from his waistcoat to his back – he “had no bowels.”   What?   The contemporary reader comes to a full stop at that line, but in the nineteenth century the meaning was clear:   bowels were the organ associated with compassion and empathy.  Much as we would use “heart” today.  And in his three spectral journeys, Scrooge travels through the bowels of time to sharpen his vision of Christmas Past, Present and Future, and to grow in love for those in need.

Charles Dickens’ nineteenth century classic A Christmas Carol remains an admonition to stay alert to the plight of fellow travelers on the road of life.  It is ever useful because then as now, we tend to wear social blinders or get stuck in our lanes.  Depending on our neighborhood or profession, those in need may be nearly invisible to us.  We may see right through them – or past them.  Just as those original Christmas travelers, Mary and Joseph, were invisible to the innkeepers who had a full house.
 
In this season when we try to sharpen our vision and fortify our bowels, let’s consider assisting some of the literal travelers on the road of life:  Ukrainian and Afghani refugees.  Since Russia's invasion of the Ukraine and since our own country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands have fled and sought refuge here and abroad.  More than 368,000 Ukrainians are fleeing to the west, entering Romania, Poland, and Moldova. Last year, more than eleven thousand Afghanis fled their Taliban-dominated home, and came to the US. In both cases, refugees been helped by the work of Dorcas International, a nonsectarian outreach group, which has dedicated itself to refugee resettlement, and making a home for the stranger. 

Groups like Dorcas International try to position these legally admitted newcomers for success in their new homeland.  With both a professional staff and LOTS of volunteers, they arrange for apartments, for English language classes, for vocational training in carpentry and the trades, enrollment of children in schools, and family assistance with grocery shopping, as the newcomers get their feet on the ground.  The needs are immense, but the folks from Dorcas and many other non-profit and church groups are there to welcome the “poor, tired, and hungry yearning to breathe free.”

But what about the poor, tired, and hungry who are here on our own shores already?  The everyday Americans, who often, because of bad fortune or drug addiction or alcohol or mental illness or domestic abuse have lost their way and are on the streets?  We cannot walk through our cities without being aware of the homeless:  folks with their carts and their pets, with a pleading sign, and a hand extended.  Nearly half a million of our fellow countrymen are homeless. On the Core Virtues site, we’ve featured the slender middle school novel Stay (by Bobby Pyron), which shines a light on those who live in Emergency Shelters and/or public parks.  And we feature some moving picture books as well.  When addressing the problem of homelessness, there are state and federal initiatives to be sure, but the national tradition of voluntarism and what used to be called “benevolent institutions” is still active and a way to extend a hand.  This is the time of year to support the work of non-profit, non-partisan groups like the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Salvation Army.  Our personal contributions and turning the attention of our students to those these groups serve is a way to keep the spirit of the holidays.
​
The holidays are a time “when Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices,” two bell ringers tell Scrooge.  His “bah-humbug” echoes in our ears.  But the miser became a changed man following that Christmas Eve journey, and it was always said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well.”  May we too know how to keep the spirit of the holidays well even beyond the holidays. ​

As night hours lengthen in the northern hemisphere and the stars seem brighter this month, we’re entitled to stare up in awe.  We see the brilliance of the heavens and the glory of shooting stars.  Should we also stare up in fear?  After all, 65 million years ago a massive meteor (six to nine miles wide) sped through the atmosphere, crashed into earth, and took out all the dinosaurs.  Ten years ago, a sixty-pound asteroid plummeted to earth from space, crashed into Russia, and injured 1500 people in its path.  What if a planet-killer ever headed our way? Could we somehow deflect it or are we defenseless?  Fortunately for us earthlings, smart people at NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab have been thinking about this.  The Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA (surprise – there is one!) has been hard at work.

On November 24, 2021, just a year ago, they launched a bold probe, sending a $325 million space craft the size of a refrigerator on a path to collide with an asteroid the size of a pyramid.  The idea was not to explode the asteroid, but to nudge it off course.  “Like throwing a tennis ball at a 747,” said NASA’s lead engineer Elena Adams.  Use the momentum of the crash to give it a shove, and make it change orbit.  Would it work? The asteroid selected, Didymos, was no threat to earth but it was conveniently located for a test, and it had a moonlet, named Dimorphos, that would serve as the target body to change the asteroid’s orbit.   This “Double-Asteroid Redirection Test” or DART was a historic first: human beings were attempting to modify the orbit of a heavenly body. On September 26, just eight weeks ago, DART hit its target.  A dramatic bullseye.  It worked!   

In I Survived Hurricane Katrina, ten-year-old Barry dreams of being a superhero. His alter-ego “Akivo” accesses his superpowers through his pinkie and a star that sends special energy to guide him.  When the young boy is swept away from his parents in crushing flood waters, he clings to an oak tree, a dislodged house, a grateful dog, and ultimately, to his hope of being reunited with his family. But he does more than cling: he shimmies up the oak, makes a leap for the house, unchains a whimpering dog tied inside, seeks out a dry patch of roof, and with the dog (named Cruz) waits for rescue. Barry’s is a fictional odyssey set during 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which took the lives of more than a thousand New Orleanians.  Lauren Tarshi tells the story well, and in persevering, the child comes to recognize both his own strength and what it means to have companions for the journey.  He doesn’t go it alone. He literally embraces his cross (Cruz) and finds his way to safety and family.

Before drinking lemonade on the deck, we are reposting our most popular July blog (2019).

Philosopher Josef Pieper wrote Leisure: The Basis of Culture in 1948, and seventy years later his insights still reward us.  In a culture that enshrines work over play, we are tempted, Pieper said, to reduce all life to purposeful activity energetically pursued.  But human flourishing requires not just effort and socially useful action, but the ability to marvel, behold, and spiritually celebrate.  Leisure is a step beyond the work-a-day world and feeds a quiet wellspring from which we live. 

Watching the sunset in a sea both violet and amber, listening to the distant caw of gulls and waves lapping the shore, drinking in a star-studded sky at the park as a symphony swells  around us, fishing in a quiet pond, meeting the dew in your garden in an early morning walk, waking in a tent on a mountain summit.  Or reading poetry beneath an old oak tree, dancing unobserved, reveling in the cool breeze through an open window as you gaze on a beloved cityscape. 

June is a month of commencements, and on June 30, 2022 we at Core Virtues will celebrate ours! With pats on the back for work well done and eyes trained on the future, the Core Virtues Foundation joyfully announces new stewardship for the Core Virtues program.  We are delighted to transition our work of nearly thirty years to the University of Dallas (UD), where Professor Jeffrey Lehman will be spearheading its ongoing development and implementation. 

This transfer is borne of mutual admiration, great synergy, and months of conversation. UD is the only university in the country to offer a Master’s degree in Classical Education. The Core Virtues program (piloted in 1992) predates the burgeoning classical school movement, but shares many of its goals.  Classical schools are distinguished for their commitment to academic rigor and virtues-based character education.  The University of Dallas, through its Saint Ambrose Center and its Center for the Arts of Liberty, is a robust resource for classical schools and assists a network of K-12 schools that share these goals. Now part of the university’s educational toolkit, the Core Virtues program will offer K-6 schools in their network and beyond an intentional and uplifting approach to character education. 

We at the Core Virtues Foundation sought out and welcomed this opportunity for the future of Core Virtues. We have strong confidence in the talents of key people at the University to advance this work.  In the years ahead, we foresee an army of energetic faculty and graduate students at UD, working to expand both the reach of the program and the range of its literary offerings.

Core Virtues schools and teachers, who rely on the regularly updated Core Virtues website, should fear no loss.  The website will be strongly supported and advanced in its new stewardship, and eventually will be fully integrated into the U.D. platform. Until such time, however, the website will maintain its current address, configuration and accessibility. All the resources you’ve come to rely on will still be found here, and key members of the Foundation will be working with UD to assist in a smooth transition.

This springboard program, building character “one story at a time” as our tagline announces, is designed to inspire all children to know and love the good through the structured reading of quality literature. Our new home will ensure that Core Virtues lives on. We hope you’ll join us in tossing hats in the air at this Core Virtues-University of  Dallas commencement. ​

“Some men see things as they are and ask why?
I dream things that never were, and ask why not?" 
​Bobby Kennedy, 1968

This May in the Core Virtues program we feature (for the first time) the virtue of “imagination” – the flight of fancy required to step outside the world we inhabit and form a new or different “image” of what the world could be.  Imagination can be used for good or evil but is a virtue when in service of a higher good (truth, goodness, or beauty). It remains the trait that unites great writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, engineers, artists, and just about anyone who asks bold, wildly speculative questions and comes up with answers. 
 
Could human beings fly? Might computers be made small enough to become personal devices? Could we produce enough food to feed 8 billion people?  Might we speak timeless truths of good and evil through a family of rabbits in the English countryside?  Or find them “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”? Or could we bring eighteenth-century triumphs to light using modern rap?  All of those questions, answered now in the affirmative, were daring dreams of the imagination just decades ago. The Wright brothers, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Norman Borlaug, Beatrix Potter, George Lucas, and Lin Manuel Miranda all share a root excellence:  imagination.
 
In each case, their imaginative work was grounded in a strong knowledge base.  Albert Einstein once famously said “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  Poet Derek Walcott observed that Einstein earned the right to say that, because he had spent much of his life accumulating a vast storehouse of knowledge upon which to apply his imagination. As had the Wright Brothers before him.  As did Steve Jobs and Lin Manuel Miranda after him. But we should still take Einstein’s point:  imagination creates steppingstones to new knowledge.
 
So how do we encourage children to use and enjoy their imaginations? First, continue to delight them with a strong knowledge base.  Wonder and imagination feast upon genuine understanding:  of the physical world, of the human past, of world literature, of mathematical truths, of the fine arts.  Children long to encounter real wonders and see the connections from different realms.
 
Second, in this busy world, parents should not forget that children need time for imaginative play.  Kids need unstructured time, outdoor time, and on-their-own time.  Free time to make up their games, to create their characters, and plan their projects – whether they are building a fort or exploring a stream or making a town of their own or going to a galaxy far, far away.  We need to resist the temptation to schedule every minute of a child’s day. 

On January 14, 2022, North Las Vegas police officer Nicholas Quintana answered a dispatch call that changed his life.  A child called 911 to report her parents fighting.  Then four shots announced a tragic end.  Twenty-seven-year-old Quintana, who was on his lunch break, felt “this abrupt urge” to answer the call, and he raced to the scene with other cops.   There they found not just a fatally shot man, but five children.  Police arrested the forty-year-old mother for killing her ex-husband. 

The couple’s children, ranging in ages from six to seventeen, were now without parents. “So, are they going to split us up?” one of the distraught children kept asking. Quintana felt he was there for a reason.  His own father had been killed by a relative when he was young.  He knew what it was like to be both fatherless, and to carry a toxic burden of hatred toward a family member who had been responsible. On the scene, as the youngest child wailed and the children anguished over their probable separate futures in child protective services, he confided to a fellow officer that he wanted to make a home for all five children.  He went home that night heavy-burdened.

Quintana and his twenty-six-year-old wife Amanda did not yet have children.  Nicholas shared his over-sized hope with his wife.  “Is this a dream?” she asked.  She was “understandably  … absolutely reluctant towards it… I was like ‘Well listen, hun, just meet the kids, just meet them, because you might fall in love with these kids. Just meet them.’”  They drove the next day to the city’s Child Haven, and hearts melted. “All of us?” the seventeen-year-old had asked wide-eyed, when Amanda and Nicholas proposed their plan.  “Every single one of you,” the Quintanas responded.  Two days later they were driving back to their three bedroom, two-bath home as a family of seven.  They were a new family, embarked on a challenging new journey. 

What motivates this largeness of heart?  Quintana speaks openly about feeling called to this, about wanting to be for the children the father they need and the one he never had.  He worries that he might fail because he had no modeling, but the experience of his father’s murder taught him an important lesson that he wants to share with the children.  He told them: “I want you to promise me that you’ll learn to forgive. It’s impossible to forget things…Especially things that hurt us the most,” but he found in his own life that he was released from the burden of toxic anger only when he could say “I don’t this hold against you anymore. I love you…That took a long time to happen, a while to happen.”  

The fact that it did happen, for him and for others, has huge ripple effects – many of them empirically verifiable. Twenty years of psychological research now supports Quintana’s conviction that forgiveness is freeing and conduces to human flourishing.  In study after study “spiritually motivated forgiveness” is linked to improved psychosocial wellbeing, mental health, and improved physical health outcomes.  It is linked to lower risk of depression.  Books with titles such as The Psychology of Forgiveness (M.E. McCullough, et al.; 2000), Forgiveness and Health (L.L. Toussaint, et al., 2015), The Handbook of Forgiveness (E.L. Worthington, et al.; 2020) and many others point to this virtue as a path to emotional and physical wellness. 
​
There are no words to describe the sort of real-life heroism of Nicholas and Amanda Quintana.  This month, as Christians remember Jesus forgiving his own crucifiers from the cross, that is the lesson he wants to share with his children. And it’s not simply a religious one.

​Mary Beth Klee