ABOUT
ABOUT
About
What is Practical Virtue?
What’s the difference between a career and calling? Can our work be more than a way to earn a living? Practical Virtue is for anyone who wants deeper integration between what they do for work and who they want to be as a human. Through animated explainer videos, short documentaries, case studies, articles, and classroom resources, we invite people working in professions such as medicine, business, engineering, and law, along with the people educating the next generation of professionals, to explore how virtue and work intersect. We invite you to join us in cultivating character, calling, and competence for the common good.
Who is behind Practical Virtue?
Practical Virtue is a production of Virtues & Vocations, a national social movement to reimagine the cultivation of character across the professions. Virtues & Vocations also offers rigorous workshops, coaching, webinars, publications, and an annual conference, inviting students, scholars, and practitioners to experience the wonder and joy of a movement that fosters character in context and boldly contributes to the revival of genuine morality in civil society and the professions.
Virtues & Vocations is housed at the Institute for Social Concerns, the scholarly home for interdisciplinary responses to questions of justice at the University of Notre Dame. It is rooted in the Institute and University’s founding commitment to the common good and vocational formation guided by a storied tradition of distinctively multi-disciplinary virtue education and scholarship.
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The WAVE Framework
What does it mean to pursue a vocation with moral seriousness? And what dispositions must practitioners cultivate to do so? These questions animate an emerging body of work from the Virtues & Vocations project at the Institute for Social Concerns, work that has led to the development of a new cross-professional framework for character formation we call WAVE: Wonder, Attention, Vibrancy, and Experience.
WAVE is a practitioner-oriented response to the challenge of character formation across the professions. Our central hypothesis is that broad moral renewal is best led through professional life. WAVE operationalizes this by identifying four foundational dispositions that together constitute a way of being in the world: one that integrates professional excellence, moral character, and a sense of calling.
Wonder names the virtue of reverent curiosity. A posture of gratitude and astonishment that, as Socrates recognized, lies at the root of wisdom itself. In professional life, Wonder resists the drift toward routine and cynicism, sustaining the practitioner’s capacity to encounter their work with fresh moral attention.
Attention is the disciplined practice of seeing what is, rather than what we wish were true. Drawing on the moral epistemology of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, WAVE treats attentiveness not merely as a cognitive skill but as a profound moral act that is essential to justice, empathy, and the integrity of professional judgment.
Vibrancy names an appreciation for beauty and a cultivated posture of joy and alacrity. Against the view that moral seriousness requires austerity, WAVE insists, with Robin Wall Kimmerer and others, that flourishing professionals are animated by a delight in their work that is itself ethically significant. Joy is not a reward for virtue; it is constitutive of it.
Experience recovers the Aristotelian insight that character is forged in practice, in daily relationships, through habituated action, and by living well, if imperfectly, over time. Character is not taught in the abstract; it is caught and wrought in the embodied rhythms of professional life.
