A welter of books have appeared dealing with the last decade or so of angry noise in the Anglican Communion about sexuality, but this one is likely to have more staying-power than most. William Sachs, director of the Center for Interfaith Reconciliation at St Stephen's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, has turned his reconciliatory skills and historical scholarship to the problems which have so excited journalists and sent talk of schism bouncing around the globe. His conclusion is impeccable: homosexuality, never a question which raised any controversy in the Church before the twentieth century, is no more than a symptom of much deeper questions about how authority is constructed in a Communion of Churches which in the past have managed comfortably to avoid schism on such minor matters as whether Anglicanism is Catholic or Protestant. Sachs provides a fine synthesis of the history of the Communion, with only the most trivial slips. It is constructed in classic Anglican fashion, with a survey of the early Church followed by an athletic leap straight over the medieval western Church to the Reformation, and then on to a very able and well-informed exposition of the transformation of a national established Church into a global family of multicultural Churches. What unites these bodies, or how far they can agree to differ, is what is at stake in the present crisis – if crisis it is. It suits some parties in the debate to present the situation as a crisis in order that they can be seen as its saviours. Sachs picks up the terminology which these parties have invented for the two sides, ‘global north’ and ‘global south’, while making it clear just how complex and paradoxical is the reality behind the labels. The ‘north’ includes Australia and New Zealand, and (as far as theological and social attitudes are concerned) South African Anglicanism ought to be added to it as well. There are other thoughtful voices in Africa which have hardly been heard amid current clamours, and even if the ‘south’ has its centre in Asia and African Anglicanism outside South Africa, it is bankrolled by an eccentric version of Anglican Evangelicalism counter-culturally holed up in Sydney, Australia, plus a good deal of money from conservative American Episcopalians who have found themselves a minority in their own Church. Sachs is perhaps more irenic than this reviewer in describing the great divide, and he does an admirable job of describing how Anglicans have got to where they think they are today. He also ends on a remarkably chirpy note about the state of play in the Episcopal Church of the United States. It would be reassuring to suppose that this last movement of his operetta is as clear-sighted as the rest of a useful and timely analysis.