Introduction to Virtue Ethics: Insights of the Ancient Greeks Book

This is an outstanding work of intellectual history. It has everything you could want: wit, solid prose, scholarly insight, and a secure knowledge of a multilingual corpus. Sheehan does an excellent job, working within English and German Bible scholarship (and nascent literary criticism) to help explain how one moves from the early authorized vernacular Bibles (Luther in Germany and King James Bible in England) to the "cultural Bible" we now know and (complexly) love. He does not tell the story of those who reject that cultural Bible and does not treat the American experience, but these minor desiderata should in no way diminish the scholarly accomplishment and pure reading pleasure of this ebullient romp through the alpine valleys of Bible scholarship in the early modern to frankly modern period. Along the way Sheehan helps to support the framing of secularity that Taylor so powerfully advocated just a couple years later, of a fundamentally religious phenomenon internal to Latin Christianity.