Slogans supplant virtue

This looks like a book worth reading: Decadence: The Passing of Personal Virtue and Its Replacement by Political and Psychological Slogans, edited by Digby Anderson. The book is a collection of essays pointing to the loss of a traditional virtue-based ethic and its replacement by a new morality centred on the self. Here is Zenit's account of the Rev. Peter Mullen's argument in one of the essays:

The old religious idea of acting virtuously for its own sake, or for God's sake, has been replaced by the psychotherapeutic notion of virtue for our own well-being. Self-respect has been replaced by self-esteem. Self-respect used to come from the peace of trying to live a virtuous life and having a clear conscience. Now it means just feeling good about ourselves and lacks any moral content.

Another of the contributors to this anthology will be familiar to some neocalvinists. Theodore Malloch was last year's Bernard Zylstra Lecturer at Redeemer University College. He writes with typical calvinist enthusiasm on – what else? – the virtue of thrift.