Heroic Habits: Discovering the Soul's Potential Greatness

You are made for greatness. Not mediocrity. Not mere goodness. Greatness. The structure of your life, your human nature, your unique body, your emotions—everything about you is oriented to your perfection. But how are we to reach greatness? In this thought-provoking book, Father Ezra Sullivan provides the forgotten key to discovering the soul’s potential for greatness: heroic habits. A habit is what makes us into saints or sinners. Just as the body can become stronger through exercise and effort, or weaker through wounds or neglect, so the entire person can develop an almost permanent state of goodness or evil through habituation to virtue or vice. Habits both reveal and shape who you are; they speak about what you have been, and they predict what you will be. Unique for a spirituality book, Heroic Habits explores and combines three realms of thought: The psychological science of habits St. Thomas Aquinas’s theory of habits Practical advice on habits Utilising humour, everyday examples, and serious scholarship, Fr. Ezra gets to the root of one of the things most mysterious to us—ourselves. Because habits are biological, psychological, and spiritual realities, Heroic Habits provides a panoramic vision of the whole human person. Front and center are why we are the way we are, how we make habits, how habits influence our lives, and how to develop good ones and eradicate bad ones, all with the help of God, as well the saints, who lived out their good habits heroically and provide a blueprint for you to do the same. Heroic Habits will help you achieve long-lasting insight about yourself, to open yourself to the transforming grace of Christ, and to develop the good habits you have always desired. Sullivan, O.P., a native of California, is a Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph in the United States. Having served in a parish after ordination to the priesthood, he is now professor of moral theology and psychology at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome (Angelicum). He is the author of Habits and Holiness: Ethics, Theology, and Biopsychology (Catholic University of America Press, 2021).

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