Reading this as a non-lawyer with no legal training whatsoever, I have to confess to finding Ventura's latest book a real page-turner and a truly fascinating overview of the complexity of legal decision-making in three effectively secular but religiously plural contexts. I came away with a real admiration for all those involved in decision-making in the legal systems of all three countries.

The book documents the shift of perception from ‘your gods’ to ‘our gods’ across the century and a half from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century in five epic chapters: ‘Explosive gods: 1979–1994’, ‘Imperial gods: 1857–1947’, ‘National gods: 1995–2000’, ‘Cold gods: 1948–1978’ and ‘Global gods: 2001–2009’. Ventura's purview takes in a plethora of significant social dilemmas and related case law in the UK, India and South Africa, its common thread being both the influence and legacy of Mohandas Gandhi and the impact of the diversity of religious practice and self-understanding in the face of legal opinion and precedence.

For me – with a scholarly interest in the nature of burgeoning multi-faith spaces and prayer rooms in today's secular institutions and the public realm– the fascination of this extraordinary book lies in its deconstruction of religious belief and practice and its emphasis on describing the differentiation (exemplified in the case of a schoolgirl's right – or not – to wear religious garments) between ‘the right to hold a belief, which is absolute, and the right to manifest belief, which is qualified’ (p 312). Ventura – rightly in my view – argues the case for the supremacy of secular legal wisdom over ‘religious ambiguity’: notwithstanding his exploration of Rowan William's much-publicised plea that people should ‘be allowed to retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters’, he is careful to challenge legal approaches that prefer ‘retreat to procedure’ as ‘a way of avoiding difficult questions in favour of practical outcomes’ (p 312).

This book raises important questions about how to handle those who ‘hear the voice of the gods’ (p 91) and therefore real challenges for those of us who espouse multicultural values, approaches and policy-making. Of especial (if, at the time of the book's publication, unforeseen) relevance, given the current Brexit negotiations, is the clear importance of the role of the European Convention: and the irksome question of what will replace it if we are – as we must be – able to continue to nourish ‘the struggle for a better future; for our own countries and beyond’ (p 348).

This is a work of great significance for our multicultural and multi-faith world, a work of wide scholarship and a depth of knowledge that will commend it to policy- and decision-makers alike, as well as to all who wish to see the better future that Ventura envisions. ‘We cannot turn the clock back’, he argues (p 341): but with this as our guide we can go forward with more confidence than before to engage the complex and shifting status of religion – ‘our gods’– in the twenty-first century.