Richard Parish's book derives from his delivery of the Bampton Lectures in Oxford, the stated terms of which are very specifically centred on the confirmation and establishment of the Christian faith. Polemic however has no place in Parish's argument. Rather, he seeks to elucidate how a variety of French Catholic writers of the Grand Siècle explained the fundamental ‘strangeness’ of their faith (the term comes from Pascal's Pensées). On the other hand, Parish's analyses may be seen as bridging the historical specificity of French Catholicism and what must be understood in its own terms as the temporally universal doctrine of the Christian Incarnation. Indeed, Parish's informed understanding of Catholic religious practice along with his immense knowledge of the highways and byways of seventeenth-century French Catholic writing makes for a strong combination. However, the introduction could have provided greater initial focus by giving more attention to the precise ways in which the ensuing argument rests on the centrality of the Incarnation and especially some space to a definition of ‘givenness’ that emerges as an important term only as the narrative develops. A central tenet of the book is then to advance our understanding, through a process of ‘constructive defamiliarisation’, of how Parish's selected authors themselves recognise the strangeness of Christianity. Parish contends that, perhaps at no other time, might this have been ‘better understood, more aggressively re-asserted or more potently expressed’ (pp. 3–4). We therefore learn how writers such as Bossuet for example envisage the ‘particularity’ of their faith in a variety of contexts, the term introducing the title of each chapter. Through the discussions of, among other things, apologetics, language and the Jansenist and Quietist controversies, another overarching theme emerges, that of ‘the common realities of life’ where the spiritual and physical lives of the faithful in the world are determined by an understanding of the doctrine of the Incarnation and by the example of the lives of the saints. Unsurprisingly, François de Sales figures prominently here. But so do the contemporary lives of individuals moved by mystical experiences (among them St Margaret Mary), and herein lies a crucial problem for orthodoxy, another important theme, in understanding the transmission of aspects of the faith from God to humankind, especially in the context of the Church's absolute authority. Here Parish touches on the limits of orthodoxy, where the Catholic faith must firmly adduce what it is and is not. Indeed, the chapter on discernment is very much required reading. Obviously, the constraints of a lecture series directed at a wider public than academics prohibits a profound engagement with the work of others, but this is most generously and helpfully referenced in the footnotes. What such a lecture series does allow for is what I might call a freedom of juxtaposition in the particular combination of authors and texts, allowing in turn a greater freedom of observation. In this way, the self-declared atheists, sceptics and believers of various traditions that Parish noted among his listeners will find in their own ways a fruitful means of engagement with this book.