We all understand poverty is a problem, one that can seem intractable and inevitable. But what if the way we have approached poverty has been wrong for years, for generations even?

There's evidence it might be.

The traditional model of the American social service industry has long been a one-size-fits-all approach that treats the symptoms of poverty — transportation, child care, food insecurity — but does nothing to address the cause. The result traps the poor in a never-ending cycle of dependency and stigma, creating repeat customers.

That scathing indictment comes not from a critic of the war on poverty but from one of its most passionate advocates.

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In Thomas Aquinas' treatment of the virtue of courage, he argues that endurance—"which is the capacity to stand immovable in the face of dangers"—rather than attack, is the chief mark of courage. Among the reasons he cites are that endurance comes into play when we face a superior foe and that it implies length of time rather than the instantaneous action of attacking.

Courage as endurance is on splendid display in the latest Terrence Malick film, A Hidden Life, the fact-based story of Franz Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who refused conscription into Hitler's army, was imprisoned and executed, and who was eventually beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007.

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Barbara Kellerman, The End of Leadership. From an industry insider who teaches leadership at Harvard comes a devastating critique of the leadership industry—both in universities and in corporate America. The book argues that the explosion of leadership training, instead of improving things, may actually be making matters worse. It also suggests that some versions of traditional liberal education may be a better starting point for educating leaders.

Michael Zantovsky, Havel: A Life. A gripping biography of the life of the great Czech dissident and politician, whose notion of "living in truth," a way of resisting the ideological distortions of communism, is remarkably germane to our own time.

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"Rock and roll's all-time worst day, December 6th." So wrote John Burks in February 1970 in Rolling Stone, referring to what might be the genre's most infamous concert — the Rolling Stones' 1969 Altamont Speedway appearance that was intended as a kind of West Coast complement to Woodstock. Instead, it erupted in violence and is best remembered for the murder of a young black man, stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels, who — at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead — were inexplicably hired as security. The violence reached a crescendo early in the Stones' set, as the band played "Sympathy for the Devil."

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John Henry Newman, whom the Catholic Church officially declared a saint this week, is a model of sanctity and of the ways in which the life of the mind and the life of faith can be beautifully and happily integrated.

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