Darcia Narvaez is a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where she studies flourishing and compassionate moral development and ecological attachment in children and adults. She is the author or editor of dozens of books, chapters and articles. Her recent book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, won the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association and from the American Education Research Association’s Moral Development and Education SIG. She writes a popular blog for Psychology Today, Moral Landscapes.

The introduction features a poem from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, read by Daniel Gardner:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.