Passion—and virtue

Even though I object to the "us versus them" attitude in this post, this paragraph makes it worth posting:

While Christian theologians have typically regarded a concept such as love as both a passion and a virtue, modern secular society has collapsed the two into each other and made the latter dependent for its meaning upon the former. Love is now really nothing more than a passion. To put it more generally, passions are virtues. When this move is made, the whole vocabulary of moral discourse concerning love and other virtues may look the same as it has always done but conceptually it has been fundamentally transformed into something very different. It is subjective and rooted in emotional responses, responses which are easy to manufacture in our aesthetic age through the instruments of pop culture.