Like the Curate's Egg, this book is good in parts. When Jason Berry is good, he is very good. And when he is bad, he is quite bad. One presumes the author's lawyers approved both good and bad. First, let us consider selections from the bad.
Berry identifies himself with the "nursing-home-flower-children" of the church with over-worn expressions such as "pray, pay and obey." (pages 9, 279, and elsewhere) One senses he would blithely repeat all the liberal follies of the Episcopal Church (PECUSA) which once made it the fastest dying religious institution in America. [1] He is definitely not an advocate of the hermeneutic of continuity, but rather that of rupture. Let Berry spare us the rhetoric of the Sixties generation, revived recently by The American Church Council. Let a younger John Paul II Generation blossom.
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