Leithart
In Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices 
At the end of the book, Herdt notes that some of these concerns have been mollified by an emphasis on the formation of Christian virtue that is both entirely gracious even as it operates through “natural” means: “A vision of Christian virtue as formed by the church and its practices has also made possible a naturalized account of the Christian moral life that renders Christian moral agency intelligible as agency rather than a miraculous surd. And it does so without reducing Christian ethics to a stronger motivation to perform universal duties, or a principle or set of principles that simply restates in somewhat different vocabulary a universal moral law. On this view, it is not through an instantaneous evangelical rebirth, a lightning bolt from heaven, that Christians are made such, but through hearing the scriptures that proclaim the story of God with us and participating in the practices of the church constituted by its willingness to be defined by that story. Christian identity is thus formed gradually, in time, by forces that are embodied and open to view – narratives, institutions, practices.”
Still, she see signs that the anxiety about splendid vices has not been entirely put to rest.
With a nod to Hauerwas, Stout on Hauerwas, and Milbank, she says, “One of my primary reasons for probing the early modern legacy of anxiety over the splendid vices has been to dispel the remaining traces of this anxiety, which both leads to a problematic preoccupation with defending the purity of Christian virtue over against pagan vices and fuels and generalized suspicion of the modern world.” In Hauerwas’ rhetoric, if not in substance, she discerns a tendency toward idealization of the church (at least we are have true virtue) and an undiscriminating denunciation of secular modernity. Virtues are found only in the church, and the boundaries between church and world are (as Stout notes) sharp and impregnable.
In both directions, then, both looking in and looking out, Christian virtue ethicists are haunted by the prospect of splendid vices. Herdt argues though that “once we concede that distinctively Christian virtues, like the virtues of non-Christians, develop through habituation, we should also recognize that this means that Christian identity is porous. What attending to habituation allows us to articulate is a chastened account of Christian distinctiveness, which can serve finally to free us from anxiety over the splendid vices and the threat of contamination.”
Wise cautions; and thanks to Davey Henreckson for alerting me to the book.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In