How do we find meaning amid loss, disruption, or the silent erosion of what we hold dear?
In Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, philosopher Nancy Sherman, a leading scholar of ancient and modern ethics, revives the enduring teachings of Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and their companions in reason. She offers not a cold or detached Stoicism, but a profoundly human one: a Stoicism of compassion, connection, and moral courage.
Sherman shows that the Stoics never advocated rugged isolation or emotional indifference. Instead, they taught that we thrive not in separation, but in relation, in our friendships, families, and communities.
True resilience, she argues, grows not from hardening the heart, but from harmonizing it with others in the shared work of living well. Drawing vivid parallels between antiquity and the present, Sherman illuminates how Stoic insights can sustain:
- Workers and caregivers are enduring burnout and exhaustion,
- First responders and soldiers confronting trauma,
- Citizens and activists striving for justice and dignity.
Through these examples, she demonstrates that rightly understood Stoicism is not an escape from emotion but an education of it, an art of transforming fear, grief, and anger into moral strength and clarity.
As Marcus Aurelius once wrote, it reminds us that the soul becomes “dyed by the color of its thoughts.”
Sherman’s book teaches us how to choose those colors wisely, to live with grace, courage, and connection in an age that too often mistakes distraction for peace.
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