---

Read a sample  *Taken from Ask of Old Paths by Grace Hamman. Copyright © 2025 by Grace Hamman. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.harpercollinschristian.com

Purchase a copy of the book

See the list of previous MIDWRC book and research award winners

Embedded within Westmont College, the Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Research Center were established in 2011 to assist Christian individuals and organizations in understanding, communicating, and implementing reliable and realistic pathways of becoming more like Christ for the good of the church and for the sake of the world. The Dallas Willard Book Award Program was created in 2015 to help place an enduring emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Dallas Willard by recognizing original written work that addresses one or more of his core concerns. Willard (1935-2013) was a philosopher at the University of Southern California and a Christian spiritual writer, authoring books such as The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, and Knowing Christ Today. Willard was a highly influential figure in the late 20th-century renewal of interest in Christian spirituality and character formation.

In Ask of Old Paths, Hamman focuses on the seven capital vices and their remedy virtues: pride and humility, envy and love, wrath and meekness, avarice and mercy, sloth and fortitude, gluttony and abstinence, lust and chastity. “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” (from the publisher’s description).