"In addressing these questions, James Gilman provides an approach to Christian ethics that is both practical and provocative. He begins by arguing that modern Christianity is involved in a peculiar deception: the mistaken belief that admiring Jesus is the same as following him. Gilman seeks to expose this deception and to show how communities of faith can make the shift from merely admiring Jesus to actually following his pattern of life. This shift involves a new understanding of Christian virtue as not only a matter of cultivating certain dispositions of character, but a matter of evoking certain empathetic emotions that will lead to the practice of Christian virtues. Gilman examines traditional virtues like love, peace, justice, and compassion, but he rejects traditional understandings that are based on conventional theologies of admiration. Instead, he views these ordinary virtues in new and extraordinary ways.