Upcoming Webinars and Book Club
Educating Character Initiative Spring 2026 Webinar Series: Communities of Practice and Character Formation
Join us for a series of online webinar sessions focused on communities of practice as a formative space for character education, moderated by Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character with the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University. These sessions feature panelists and presenters who will equip participants to shape communities of practice that support character-building efforts across distinct domains. Communities of practice can be powerful vehicles for building communities of character and creating resources that serve educators across a wide range of roles in higher education. We’re pleased to offer these webinars in a virtual forum that enables more of the ECI community to learn from colleagues doing important work across the country.
Session 1: The Arts and the Formation of Character
Session Leader: Karen Bohlin, Director of the Practical Wisdom Project, Abigail Adams Institute
Description: In this webinar session, we engage with Karen Bohlin to explore how the fine arts can provide a powerful formative ethos for character-building efforts. How do they form our affections and our desires? How do the practices central to the fine arts contribute to our character development? How can educators draw lessons from the fine arts for their own character-building efforts?
Date/Time: January 15, 2026, 4–5 p.m.
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
Session 2: Faculty Development and Educating Character
Session Leaders: Andrew Abela, Dean of the Busch School of Business and Ordinary Professor of Marketing, Catholic University of America; Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katherine Woodworth Chair and Professor in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program; Qin Zhu, Associate Professor of Engineering Education, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Description: In this webinar, we’ll engage three principal investigators of Institutional Impact Grants to discuss their efforts to equip faculty to build character in their courses and curricula. How do we structure faculty development efforts to ensure that faculty are well prepared for the complexity of character development across disciplines? How does faculty development for character-building efforts differ from other forms of professional development? What are some good models for how to do this work well?
Date/Time: February 12, 2026, 4-5 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
Session 3: Cultivating Character in and through Athletics
Session Leaders: Corey Crossan Stevens, Research and Teaching Fellow, Oxford Character Project; Wendell Dunn, Assistant Director of Leadership and Character in Athletics, Program for Leadership and Character, Wake Forest University; and Paul Putz, Program Director for the Master of Arts in Theology and Sports Studies Director for the Faith & Sports Institute, Baylor University.
Description: Some of the earliest works on character used analogies from athletics to describe character formation: just as athletes form skills through repeated practice, individuals form character through repeated practice. In this webinar, we discuss character in athletics, framing it as a powerful formative domain for individuals and teams.
Date/Time: March 31, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
Session 4: Building an Institutional Culture for Character
Session Leaders: Nicole Dunteman, Hope Forward Program Director, Hope College; Trygve Throntveit, Ball State University; and Nathan Webb, Vice President of Whole Person Formation & Leadership Development, Belmont University.
Description: Building an institutional culture to support character formation efforts is a complex task, requiring significant investment and commitment from institutional leaders, including presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs, as well as deep engagement across faculty and staff at all levels of implementation. It also requires attention to an organization’s structural dimensions that can scaffold and sustain programming. In this webinar, we engage with leaders from two grantee institutions who have been particularly attentive to the complex, multifaceted work of building a culture for character formation, and we learn from their efforts to create a culture that forms character as a core dimension of the institution’s mission.
Date/Time: April 23, 4-5 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
Session 5: Grantee Spotlight
Session Leaders: To be announced.
Date/Time: May 21, 4-5 p.m. ET
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
The Flourishing Student Webinar Series, in Partnership with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at The University of Birmingham
In recent years, many universities have expressed their commitment to a holistic, socially-engaged vision of higher education and are increasingly talking about supporting students in developing ‘character’ and ‘attributes’. These are the qualities students need to navigate the fourth industrial revolution, flourish, and make a positive contribution to society.
This international webinar series, presented in partnership with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at The University of Birmingham, features presentations on universities’ role in helping their students cultivate the character and attributes required for human flourishing. Following the success of the first and second series, this third series will feature six additional world-leading universities renowned for their focus on character education, sharing their knowledge and expertise.
Session 3: University of California, Irvine
Session Leader: Duncan Pritchard, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology and Society; Director of The Anteater Virtues Project
Date/Time: January 19, 2026, 12 – 1 p.m. EST
Session 4: SDU University, Kazakhstan
Session Leader: Speakers to be confirmed.
Date/Time: Specific date and time in March 2026 to be confirmed.
Session 5: University of Teacher Education Vienna
Session Leader: Roland Bernhard, professor of School Development, Leadership & Leadership Culture, University of Teacher Education Vienna/Krems, and Fellow at the University of Salzburg
Date/Time: May 5, 2026, 9 – 10 a.m. EDT
Session 6: Superior University, Pakistan
Session Leader: Syed Ali Mohsin Naqvi, Director CAKCCIS, Chaudhry Abdul Khaliq Center for Contemporary Islamic Sciences
Date/Time: Specific date and time in June 2026 to be confirmed.
ECI Community Book Club
Our book club engages authors in conversations about their published books and their implications for character-building efforts. An ECI Scholar of Character interviews the author during the first half of each gathering, and the second half is devoted to audience Q&A.
The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction by Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe
Book Description: From the philosophy of Aristotle and Confucius, to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, to the paintings of Raphael, Botticelli and many more, fascination with the virtues has endured and evolved to fit a wide range of cultural, religious, and philosophical contexts through the centuries.
This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the various virtues: the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues, as well as the capital vices. It explores the role of the virtues in moral life, their cultivation, and how they offer ways of thinking and acting that are alternatives to mere rule-following. It also considers the relationship of the virtues to our own emotions, desires, and rational capacities.
Author Bios: Craig A. Boyd is Professor of Philosophy & Humanities at Saint Louis University, where he also earned his PhD in philosophy in 1996. His scholarship engages virtue ethics broadly, with special attention to Aquinas’ moral theory and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He has published 50 scholarly articles and essays and six books, including The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction with Kevin Timpe (Oxford University Press, 2021), Virtues and Their Vices co-edited with Kevin Timpe (Oxford University Press, 2014); Faith and Reason: Three Views, with Alan Padgett and Carl Raschke (Intervarsity Press, 2014), Visions of Agapé: Problems and Possibilities in Divine and Human Love (Ashgate, 2008), and A Shared Morality: A Narrative Defense of Natural Law Ethics (Brazos Press, 2007).
Kevin Timpe currently holds the William H. Jellema Chair at Calvin University. Timpe’s primary research interests span the metaphysics of free will, philosophy of disability, virtue ethics, and philosophical theology.
Date, Time, Location: Thursday, February 5, 2026, 4-5 p.m. ET via Zoom
Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy by Benjamin Miller
Book Description: This book argues that Aristotelian character education cannot work in liberal democracies today. It shows that when we clearly understand the basic structure of Aristotle’s value theory and correctly grasp the core requirements of liberalism, we will see that they are fundamentally incompatible.
Neo-Aristotelian theories of character have been immensely influential, receiving endorsements from academics, educators, and elected representatives, and establishing and influencing major academic centers and numerous K-12 schools, especially in the U.K. and U.S. This book argues that, despite its meteoric rise and widespread public influence, neo-Aristotelian character education should be rejected. The author argues that the theory’s underlying structure is incompatible with the value pluralism and antipaternalism required by liberal democracies. The main features that make Aristotelianism attractive―its robust theory of human flourishing that grounds character and its account of the virtue of practical wisdom―are the very same features that make its educational theory illiberal.
Understanding the problematic structure of neo-Aristotelian education helps us better grasp the demands of liberal democracy while also drawing attention to the neglected question of how education for democratic citizenship can be made to accommodate equal respect and tolerance for all liberal-compatible ways of living and worldviews.
Against Aristotelian Character Education is essential reading for scholars and graduate students interested in philosophy of education, education theory, virtue ethics, practical wisdom, political theory, and Aristotle.
Author Bio: Benjamin Miller is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on democratic citizenship and the role citizens should play in preserving and improving democratic functioning. In democratic theory and philosophy, he is most interested in identifying which skills and value commitments citizens need to excel in their obligations as citizens.
Much of his research concentrates on understanding citizenship by analyzing the history of political thought. He is primarily focused on understanding Aristotle’s conception of good citizenship. “Many research centers, scholars policy-makers, and schools today (especially in the UK) are attracted to Aristotle’s theory of character education and brand themselves as neo-Aristotelians or proudly claim to be influenced by Aristotle. My own view is that Aristotle’s theory of virtue is fundamentally illiberal in its basic foundations and cannot be made to fit with liberal democracy’s major principle of respecting pluralism,” Miller writes. He makes this argument in his book Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy.
Date, Time, Location: Monday, April 13, 2026, 4-5 p.m. ET via Zoom