Contemplative Prayer and Moral Formation

At a meeting today I was asked "How to you get people to do the right thing?" I heaved a sigh. Indeed, that is the $64,000 question. Why do we still read headlines of financial scandal when business ethics has been taught in MBA programs for decades? Why do we continue to make irrational choices that hurt ourselves, other people, and the environment?

It has become clear that the intellectual approach to ethics taught in most American universities only goes so far. What seems to be needed is an approach that integrates the mind and the heart to motivate the will - an approach I especially resonate with since I addressed a good portion of my dissertation to self-integration in the Christian moral philosophies of St. Augustine and H. Richard Niebuhr. That was all very heady; I want now to explore a more integrated approach to self-integration.

I've been a practitioner of contemplative prayer for about 20 years. It may be dangerous to extrapolate universal truths from personal experience, but everyone does, so I will, too. I think contemplative prayer can play an important role in self-integration and hence to the formation of moral integrity. I would like to spend some time investigating this relationship through this blog.

So over the next few posts, I'm going to "think out loud" about contemplative prayer and how it contributes to moral integrity by integrating the self - promoting self-knowledge and, as I call it, "ethics from the inside out." The next post will explain what contemplative prayer is.