For people who appreciate clear thinking expressed with precision and elegance, Brian McLaren has for many years been a figure to watch and take seriously. McLaren is prolific, but each of his books has been produced with care—in the fullness of time, as it were, as his thought has matured and as his sense of the crisis facing American Christianity has deepened.

In Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? McLaren takes up a vexing question posed by Dean M. Kelley 40 years ago: Why isn’t there a Christianity that is both passionate/orthodox and also reasonable/progressive (my terms)?