This striking collection of essays finds its main source in a sense of ‘frustration’. Over the last decade or so the debate about secularisation has intensified in British circles, attracting the attention of social historians, sociologists and all kinds of commentators at large. Inevitably, this is not an easy discussion to characterise in a handful of generalisations, but if it does present a dominant character at all, the work of Callum Brown comes nearer to achieving this than anything else. Brown's shadow is certainly a long one here. When the authors advance arguments of their own they are often conscious of doing so against him; when they stretch into new territory they seem very much aware of doing something that he has not done himself. The simple label of ‘decline’, earned by inexorable tides of statistics marking declining congregations, contracting finances, church closures and suchlike, is for these authors a thing too loaded to be useful. Instead they prefer to trace lines of ‘transformations’ and these yield a quite new vocabulary: experience, performance, transmission, language and virtue. On these terms follow discussions of prayer, music, priesthood, public thought, great events, popular youth culture, nuclear disarmament, technology, art and literature, ambivalence (‘over virtue’), education, economics, liberalism, intellectualism, the media and identity (in Northern Ireland). These excursions are generally quite short and clearly more intent on provoking the new perspective than settling into sustained argument. Some of the fireworks go off splendidly; some turn out to be rather damp squibs. Almost all of them are lively and together they represent something of the tenor of a busy colloquium on paper. Perhaps the cumulative effect is one of fragmentation. Perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Has the case for ‘decline’ really been rebutted, redefined or bypassed altogether? The reader might be left to reflect that if the Churches are indeed a declining presence they are at least declining interestingly. At all events, this quite diverse group has achieved a quality of intellectual bustle which might well be relished.