Introducing the Pietas Papers

Pietas Quest Question: What is the master virtue that enables all other virtues and makes a meaningful life possible?

Direct Answer
Before pietas a man’s conscience is scattered by passion and the need for validation. After pietas he masters himself through duty aligned with conscience and rests content in Providence. The nearer he approaches immunity from passion, the nearer he draws to real strength and peace. This is the disciplined fusion of duty and contentment.

It’s been several years since I launched my first online project called Engaged Awareness. At the time, I was an Army civil affairs officer, and my goal was to make the most of the cognitive processes that I was endowed with as a sentient, reasoning being. The more I thought about and researched the topic, the clearer it became that the entire purpose of our cognitive processes was to elicit meaning from whatever we focused our attention on. Engaged Awareness became Chase Meaning.

During this next stage of my intellectual journey, I found that meaningful understanding is essential but means little if not acted upon. By this time I had left civil affairs and become a strategist, so I approached the challenge of living a free and meaningful life through the lens of strategy. Thus, Chase Meaning became Strategies for Freedom.

During this time, I undertook to write a dual biography of two of America’s most influential Founding Fathers: George Washington and John Witherspoon. (The book is currently under peer‑review and will be published by McFarland next year.) The most important lesson I learned over the course of researching and writing the book was that the cornerstone of Washington and Witherspoon’s “strategy for freedom,” both at a societal and an individual level, was a moral quality that I’ve come to refer to as pietas.

I came to find that pietas is the master virtue, the cultivation and practice of which enables all other virtues and is the single essential element in living meaningfully and realizing our full potential as human beings. Pietas is the disciplined fusion of duty and contentment, of moral purpose and peaceful acceptance of all that lies beyond our control. It is obedience to Providence combined with confident resignation to His will.

My intellectual journey has led me to conclude that cultivating the master virtue of pietas is the most worthwhile purpose that one can pursue, and to do so is the aim both of The Pietas Papers and Project Pietas as a whole (which you can learn more about here).

I’d love for you to join me on this journey. For now, I’ll leave you with the pietas prayer, which I pray with my son every night and return incessantly to over the course of each day:

Almighty God, help me to do my duty and be content; to understand meaningfully and act courageously; and to live free in pursuit of what is good.