Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The book is an intermediate introduction to virtue ethics, suitable for upper-division undergraduate, graduate, or seminary students. It places contemporary (“pure”) virtue ethics among modern ethical theories as efforts to secure the “foundations” of ethical norms and sketches its instigation in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre. Pure virtue ethics is criticized. The book proposes, instead, a practice of virtue ethics that resembles ancient virtue ethics with its more exploratory procedure and its aim of affecting the wisdom and happiness of its practitioners. It sketches the practices of Socrates, Aristotle, and Seneca the Stoic as illustrating what is proposed, but much of the book is a deeper exploration of the moral outlook of the New Testament with respect to the traits of character that it entails. Thus, the book offers an introduction to virtue ethics, a normative proposal of how to do it, and an extended illustration with the case of Christianity.</jats:p>