Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation Isabel Klee wrote this book from the place where most people are too embarrassed to look: the overlap between how badly a frightened dog needs someone to stay, and how badly the person staying needs to figure out why she keeps crying. The premise is deceptively simple — Klee fosters dogs with difficult behavioral histories and, in caring for them, runs headlong into her own unresolved complications with boys, grief, and the ordinary disasters of young adult life. The book moves between the kennel and the kitchen table, and the wit comes from Klee's refusal to rank one set of problems above the other. Readers who have ever loved an animal through its worst fears, or who have done the same for themselves on a bad Tuesday, will find the structure immediately recognizable. It is written for anyone who suspects that showing up for something small and frightened is the same work, at different scales, as showing up for themselves. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: The book affirms the person as a relational, embodied being whose moral growth is inseparable from concrete, particular acts of care. Klee's attention to a foster dog's body — its posture, its flinch, its gradual willingness to eat from a hand — is simultaneously attention to her own interiority. This is the unity of body and soul in practice: the carer's somatic and emotional state is not incidental to the dog's recovery; it is constitutive of it. - **Fallen**: The parallel structure between the dogs' conditioned fear responses and Klee's own relational wounds maps onto a classic account of disordered attachment — the tendency to brace against intimacy, to preempt rejection, to organize one's behavior around anticipated harm. The dogs' histories of mistreatment are legible; Klee's own disorder is more diffuse and therefore more recognizable to most readers. - **Redeemed**: Each foster dog's arc from terror to tentative trust is not simply a behavioral outcome; it is a figure for incremental restoration. Klee depicts this as practice, not event — small repetitions of reliable presence that slowly rewire expectation. This maps onto what Aquinas describes as the formation of habit: the will's orientation is changed by accumulated particular acts, not by a single decision. - **Prudence (memory)**: The memoir form is doing moral work. Klee returns to earlier fostering failures and earlier relational missteps not to perform self-flagellation but to extract usable knowledge. This is prudence-memory functioning correctly: past suffering becomes data rather than identity. - **Justice (friendliness)**: The book models a form of genuine goodwill that does not require reciprocity to sustain itself — a foster dog cannot promise to get better, and a person navigating her own complications cannot promise to be consistently generous. Klee's willingness to keep showing up anyway, with humor rather than resentment, is the specific texture of what the tradition calls friendliness as a virtue. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon The emotional core of Klee's project — the claim that a person's suffering outlasts its original cause and reorganizes around symbols, associations, and relational patterns long after the wound itself is gone — finds a precise theoretical account in Hayes[^1], who argues that human beings, unlike animals, can activate a fear response through a thought, a word, or an abstract association, not only through direct stimulus. Where the dog in Hayes's illustration[^2] needs an actual kick, or at minimum the arrival of the person who kicks, the human being need only summon the name of the threat; this is the asymmetry that makes human suffering both more pervasive and, crucially, more amenable to language-based transformation — the same mechanism that makes it worse can, when redirected, make it better. Klee works this territory from the memoir side rather than the clinical side, but the dynamic she describes in herself is exactly what Hayes maps. The Mate[^3] passage — 'I no longer confuse stuff that happens with my life. This moment is okay, even when things are coming apart at the seams' — captures the attitudinal shift Klee's book works toward: not the elimination of difficulty, but the refusal to let circumstance define the whole person. From a CCMMP standpoint, both Hayes and Mate are identifying something real about the Fallen condition's grip on consciousness, but neither supplies the transcendent horizon that would allow the Redeemed state to be more than hard-won naturalistic resilience; Klee's book shares this limitation and would be read most fully alongside an account of what the tradition means by hope as a theological virtue rather than a psychological posture. ## References 1. Hayes, Steven (n.d.). *Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life*. — 'To be human is to feel pain in ways that are orders of magnitude more pervasive than what the other creatures on planet Earth feel.' 2. Hayes, Steven (n.d.). *ACT and RFT videos* (DMU video lecture). — 'animals can't... build... networks... like we as humans do' 3. Mate, Gabor (n.d.). *In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts*. — 'I no longer confuse stuff that happens with my life. This moment is okay, even when things are coming apart at the seams.'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book treats animal care — specifically foster-dog rehabilitation — as a legitimate arena for human moral development, affirming the Thomistic premise that the person is a relational, embodied being whose growth occurs through concrete, particular acts of care rather than abstract intention.
- ✓Klee's parallel structure (dog's trauma alongside her own complications) models what Aquinas calls the unity of appetitive and cognitive formation: attending to another creature's fear and disorder requires the carer to regulate her own disordered responses, making the caregiving relationship a school of self-knowledge.
- ✓The book's memoir form enacts prudence-memory: Klee returns to past failures with foster dogs and past relational missteps in her own life as data for present judgment, rather than suppressing or inflating them.
- ✓The foster-care frame implicitly depicts the Redeemed state as a practice rather than a status — each dog arriving broken and leaving more capable of trust mirrors the incremental, grace-assisted arc of human restoration.
- ✓Klee's willingness to name her own emotional complications alongside the dogs' behavioral challenges avoids the sentimental trap of projecting pure virtue onto the caregiver, giving the book unusual honesty about how care is simultaneously given and received.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's therapeutic anthropology appears to rest on a secular attachment model without an explicit account of why human suffering differs in kind from animal suffering — a distinction that matters for any account of redemption or moral growth with specifically human dimensions.
- ⚠The parallel structure between dog rehabilitation and personal struggle risks flattening the asymmetry between animal conditioning and human freedom: a dog cannot choose to reinterpret its history the way a person can, and the book may not sufficiently honor that distinction.
- ⚠Without a transcendent horizon, the resolution the book offers — learning to cope, learning to trust again — may stop short of the Redeemed state properly understood, settling instead for a naturalistic resilience that is real but incomplete.