Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>All of us some of the time and some of us all of the time strive to achieve our own happiness and well-being solely on the dubious strength of our own individual skills, knowledge, willpower, and ingenuity. And we fail—spectacularly, miserably, often succumbing to one of the many masks of the capital vice known as Sloth. Each of the pieces that jointly compose this volume is a mixture of a personal essay of reflection and a mainstream academic article, and each explores either the occasions or consequences of such failures or else strategies for their avoidance. The chapters are loosely connected insofar as they are either inquiries into certain kinds of temptation (temptations of a sort likely to appeal to the intellectually oriented) or confessions of the costs of discovering that one has been thus seduced into sin (costs of a sort likely to be suffered by the intellectually oriented) or exhortations to prepare oneself to avoid those temptations and their costs (by invoking strategies of a sort often accessible to the intellectually oriented). The three parenthetical remarks in the preceding sentence suggest a unifying theme of these chapters, insofar as the topics they address are presented in a context and language familiar to professional analytic philosophers and analytic theologians. The members of these two groups often share a psychological profile and temperament and set of values and assortment of weaknesses (sometimes masquerading as strengths) here subjected to analytical inquiry and critical reflection.</jats:p>