Pride • Envy • Anger • Sloth • Greed • Gluttony • Lust
- Purchase The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler
Why does it often feel good to do something bad? In a world where we are encouraged to indulge, splurge, live a little—even visit “Sin City”—has the ancient religious concept of sin lost its sway over the moral imagination?
The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler, a new collection of stories published by the Great Books Foundation, allows readers to peer into the hidden recesses of sinful thought and behavior. Without moralizing, the authors in this book—Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, and D. H. Lawrence, to name a few—use fiction to explore our all too human thirst for transgressive pleasure.
For readers who know that good and evil isn’t simply a matter of black and white, this collection will provoke lively conversation and sober contemplation. The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler comes with discussion questions for both book group and classroom use, as well as a foreword by Al Gini that explains the history of the seven deadly sins and their place in popular culture today.
Table of Contents
| Pride | Envy |
|---|---|
“A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner | “Roman Fever,” Edith Wharton |
“Good Country People,” Flannery O’Connor | “Smokers,” Tobias Wolff |
| Anger | Sloth |
“Mary Postgate,” Rudyard Kipling | “The House with the Mezzanine,” Anton Chekhov |
“Hairball,” Margaret Atwood | “Shiloh,” Bobbie Ann Mason |
| Greed | Gluttony |
“The Rocking-Horse Winner,” D. H. Lawrence | “Fat,” Raymond Carver |
"The Inherited Clock,” Elizabeth Bowen | “Famine,” Xu Xi |
| Lust | |
"Not a Good Girl,” Perri Klass |
The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler
Daniel Born, Mike Levine, and Don Whitfield, Eds.
ISBN# 978-1-880323-19-9
Softcover, 270 pages, $19.95
Published: September 2007
From the Foreword
According to biblical tradition, we are all sinners, doomed because of the first couple’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. St. Augustine describes humankind as “full of evil lusts and inclinations from our mothers’ wombs.” To tone down the rhetoric a notch, one might say we succumb easily to our passions.
Fifteen hundred years ago, St. Gregory the Great created a list of seven sins as a tool for contemplation, one to help monks maintain their ascetic regimen of chastity, poverty, and obedience. This list is still around today:
- Pride
- Envy
- Anger
- Sloth
- Greed
- Gluttony
- Lust
The authors in this collection offer us many different ways of thinking about sin. They don’t necessarily present a set of settled opinions on the deadly sins themselves, but they do keep us thinking and imagining what the moral life might be. Socrates put it another way, his student Plato tells us, in words that ring down through the centuries with equal force: The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Al Gini, author of The Importance of Being Lazy and Why It’s Hard to Be Good