The topic of analogy continues to be hotly debated in contemporary theological circles, especially as an ongoing ecumenical bone of contention between Protestants and Catholics. This volume of essays is the edited and published form of the proceedings of a colloquium on analogy by the same title which took place at the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC, in 2008. Sponsored by the Center, the Dominican House of Studies, and the publisher, the conference gathered together a strong cast of theologians from across the ecumenical spectrum to discuss various aspects of the problem of analogy. This carefully edited and well-organised collection of the presentations is a fine addition to the literature on this important topic.

The ghosts of Erich Przywara and Karl Barth haunt the anthology, as each of the papers addresses, either directly or indirectly, the dispute between the two which took place during the early 1930s. The volume editor, Thomas Joseph White, correctly identifies that debate as the incipient form of ‘the single most important ecumenical controversy of the twentieth century’ (p. 1). Przywara's masterful study of analogy (English edition: Przywara, Analogia Entis, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013)), contains careful, critical engagements with concepts of analogy from medieval theology and post-Kantian philosophy and spells out the importance of the doctrine for the Catholic tradition. While Barth selects Przywara as an interlocutor in various places throughout the Church Dogmatics, it is his prefatory remark, itself lacking a direct reference to Przywara's study, that he ‘regard(s) the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist’ (Barth, CD I/1, p. x.iii) which more or less set the tone for subsequent Protestant polemics against the Catholic doctrine. Whether Barth in fact misread Przywara is a common line of inquiry in the essays found in our volume. Whatever the solution to that problem may be, the collection does much to identify a number of the issues behind the debate and to clarify the extent to which it remains significant for contemporary theological discourse and Protestant–Catholic ecumenism.

Between a helpful introduction by the editor and plenty of supporting back matter, which includes an epilogue by Richard Schenk, the essays are arranged in four units which correspond to particular aspects of the ongoing discussions: (1) the theological contours of the original debate; (2) some ecumenical proposals which point to potential ways beyond the impasse; (3) the significance of the analogia entis for theologies of Thomistic ressourcement; and (4) examples of fresh approaches to analogy in recent Christian dogmatics. While the parameters of this review prohibit us from paying attention to details, we note for interested readers that, unlike most multi-authored, edited collections, the contributions in The Analogy of Being exhibit a remarkable degree of formal and material continuity across these units. Moreover, it is clear that each author painstakingly researched his topic and, consequently, the volume as a whole has a feel of a scholarly monograph, rather than a collection of conference papers. As such, it will assuredly find a place as a research tool for other scholars engaging the doctrine of analogy and its contemporary significance.

It could be argued that the volume's internal consistency is due to the uniformity of gender among the participants of the study. While one may easily overstate such a case, it is indeed intriguing to imagine how the book – and the conference – would have appeared had the event organisers included voices from beyond the borders set by confessional dissensus (e.g. theological feminism, interreligious dialogue, progressive and/or liberal theologies, etc.). It is also worth noting that the table of contents is populated by essays written by scholars from only the Catholic and reformed traditions. Surely theologians of other Protestant persuasions have some stake in the debates over analogy. Still, such caveats should not and do not detract from what is, on the whole, an indispensable contribution to contemporary ecumenical and systematic theology.