Published conference proceedings come in two general varieties. Some offer a documentary record of a particular scholarly gathering. In this case, editors are primarily collectors of manuscripts. Proceedings of the second type are more than the sum of their parts. Their editors select and organise contributions with an eye towards ensuring that the published collection possesses thematic unity; they may even encourage contributors to respond to one another, so that the dialogue which began at the conference can continue in print. Proceedings of this type have as their primary goal not a record of the original gathering but a coherent contribution to an ongoing debate.

Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century is of the second variety. The book emerged from a four-day international consultation on ‘The Future of the Study of Theology and Religions’ held at the University of Cambridge in September 2000, ‘where initial drafts of some of the chapters were intensively discussed by a group of sixty invited academics’ (p. xv). By that time the topic had already been a focus for seminars and conferences in the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity for three years. The gradual genesis of the project contributes to a breadth and depth of scholarly engagement that far exceeds what one typically expects from volumes of conference proceedings.

As the conjunction ‘theology and religions’ suggests, the book's focus is the British academic context, in which theology and religious studies seem to exist side by side in relative peace. Indeed, all but three of the contributors (two Americans and a South African) are British. The book's organic connection with Britain and Cambridge (the editors and three of the authors hailed from this institution at the time of writing and the book is dedicated to long-time Cambridge Professor of Divinity Nicholas Lash) makes its applicability to other academic contexts less than obvious. In fact, to readers familiar with the current landscape of American academic life, constructions such as ‘scholars of Theology and Religious Studies’ (p. 208) must seem hopelessly confused.

But if the British situation does not reflect the American compulsion to divorce the normative from the phenomenological, many essays in Fields of Faith draw attention to dichotomising forces that threaten to make ‘purely institutional’ (p. 221) the unity of the so-called discipline of theology and religious studies. The ‘implicit emphasis upon dialogue and debate’ (p. 209) that characterises the collection is no doubt a strategy for countering the forces of dissolution with ‘a wise commitment to a certain way of shared living and thinking’ (p. 221). If the book offers a theoretical basis for maintaining the unity of theology and religion, it is Nicholas Lash's suggestion in The Beginning and End of Religion (1996) that the ‘mutual ground’ of traditions in deep engagement replace the putative ‘neutral ground’ of the Enlightenment. (Lash is referred to twenty times in Fields of Faith, more than any other thinker, ancient or modern.)

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, ‘The End of the Enlightenment's Neutral Ground’, features chapters on ‘The Study of Religion and the Rise of Atheism: Conflict or Confirmation?’ (Michael J. Buckley SJ), ‘Doing Theology in the University’ (Denys Turner), ‘Shaping the Field: A Transatlantic Perspective’ (Sarah Coakley) and ‘The Study of Religion as Corrective Reading’ (Gavin Flood). Part II, ‘Meetings on Mutual Ground’, includes articles on ‘God’ (Rowan Williams), ‘Love’ (Julius Lipner), ‘Scripture’ (Peter Ochs), ‘Worship’ (Eamon Duffy), ‘Argument’ (Nicholas Adams), ‘Reconciliation’ (John W. de Gruchy), ‘Friendship’ (Janet Martin Soskice) and ‘Justice’ (Maleiha Malik). The book concludes with a ‘Response’ by Nicholas Adams, Oliver Davies and Ben Quash and includes helpful name and subject indexes.

The articles in part I are insightful treatments of various aspects of the larger topic, all of which foreground theoretical and practical questions related to the teaching and study of theology and religion. The authors of essays in part II were charged with ‘performing the interplay of theology and religious studies’ (p. xiii). But many of these essays, while illuminating concepts such as scripture, worship and friendship in novel ways, are rather tenuously related to the larger theme of the book. John W. de Gruchy's chapter on ‘Reconciliation’, for instance, after focusing exclusively on the South African experience, offers a postscript on the future of theology and religious studies which notes that reconciliation is ‘also a subject that demands the combined interdisciplinary attention of those engaged in theological and religious studies’ (p. 165). Too many of the contributions to part II reflect this superficial attention to the topic supposed to be at the heart of Fields of Faith.

Still, this book makes for very interesting reading. The contributors are careful scholars whose brief articles are very engaging, even if they sometimes fail to keep the relationship between theology and religious studies in view. For readers concerned with the study and teaching of theology and religion in the twenty-first century, the editors of Fields of Faith provide a stimulating guide to discussion and debate.