Upcoming Release

Releasing September 9, 2025

Traditional Christian virtue and vices like abstinence, gluttony, and sloth make many of us bored or uncomfortable. At their best, these words sound dead or confusing, like incomplete fossils that belong to a distant past awkwardly enshrined in a museum. At worst, they signify a prejudiced past, when these words were wielded like weapons.

Yet in medieval writing, the language of the virtues and vices was powerful, lively, and delightfully weird. Patience is described as a peppercorn. Unicorns preach chastity. Knightly virtues fend off devious vices by throwing roses at them. In medieval books, words like avarice and meekness meant different things and carried different weight than they do today. And great medieval preachers and poets taught the virtues as crucial to what it meant to live a life of holiness, right alongside the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.

Ask of Old Paths by Grace Hamman meditates upon those strange and wonderful word-pictures and explanations of virtues and vices found in medieval traditions of poetry, sermons, and treatises long confined to dusty corners of the library. It focuses on the ancient tradition of virtue language called the Seven Capital Virtue Remedies: pride and humility, envy and love, wrath and meekness, avarice and mercy, sloth and perseverance, gluttony and abstinence, lust and chastity.

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In accessible and thoughtful chapters, scholar and writer Grace Hamman shows how learning about these pairs of medieval virtues and vices can help us reevaluate our own washed out and insipid moral vocabulary in modernity. Our imaginations for the good life are expanded; our longing for sanctification sharpens. Old ideas can give us new fire in our practice of the virtue–and in that practice, we imitate Jesus and become more human.

The virtues can give us a vocabulary, guide rails, pilgrim friends. Diving into their images, pausing on their beauty, and soaking in their strangeness can breathtakingly sharpen and direct our desires in expansive, creative, divine love. For love grows as understanding grows.

-Grace Hamman

Will be available in

ebook and audiobook!

In this thoroughly researched and wonderfully written gem of a book, Grace Hamman recovers wisdom from a time before modernity’s assault upon the garden of the soul. In Ask of Old Paths we really do find “something a little wild and beautiful.” I love this book!

Brian Zahnd, author of The Wood Between the Worlds

Ask of Old Paths retrieves more than the language of virtue and vice—it turns to Christian history to recover a robust theology of a whole and holy human life. Grace Hamman offers us a rare treasure–rich theology and history, presented in an engaging and accessible manner, for the sake of actual human lives. This is a book that will not only teach you about the virtues and vices, it will inspire you to deeper thought and greater faithfulness.

Kaitlyn Schiess, author of The Ballot and the Bible and co-host of The Holy Post

In Ask of Old Paths, Grace Hamman offers readers a bountiful gift, retrieving ancient wisdom for modern-day believers and seekers. Equipped with the insights of a scholar and the humility of a fellow pilgrim, Hamman guides readers on the path of virtue toward a flourishing life in and with Christ. Readers willing to take this journey will be challenged, relieved, and ultimately transformed.

Rev. Claude Atcho, pastor of Church of the Resurrection (Charlottesville, VA) and author of Rhythms of Faith and Reading Black Books

A wise and beautiful work of scholarship and devotion. Grace Hamman brings her immense knowledge of the medieval world to her exploration of the virtues, and has created a work that both grips the imagination and stirs the heart. This book will be a resource and inspiration for years to come.

Sarah Clarkson, author of Reclaiming Quiet and This Beautiful Truth