The Year of Living Virtuously: Weekends Off

By: Teresa Jordan

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Synopsis: It was Benjamin Franklin who came up with the list - temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility. Then, for a year writer and visual artist Teresa Jordan sought to live it, taking weekends off.In the journal she kept, Jordan records her struggles with living in accordance with those perhaps antiquainted notions of virtue, as well as the temptations of the seven deadly sins. Those meditations became this collection of beautifully illustrated essays devoted to her quest to find meaning in what she calls her "ordinary life."Here the personal anecdote is interwoven with the thoughts of theologians, philosophers, scholars and scientists, including an evolutionary biologist. Though she claims to never have aspired to moral perfection, Jordon admits she did at times become all but obsessed with certain regimes concerning time management or diet and exercise.Benjamin Franklin charted his own progress by weekly entry, observing - in his 79th year - "I was supris'd to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined."Teresa Jordan offers a wry and intimate look at one individual devoting one year in the middle of her life to the challenge of trying to live authentically and with holistic concern for those around us.