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LEAVING CHRISTENDOM FOR GOOD: CHURCH-WORLD DIALOGUE IN A SECULAR AGE, James McEvoy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), pp. 189, hardback US$85.00, eBook US$84.99. Australian recommended retail prices are not yet available.
In a world of strident voices with fundamentalist convictions, this book speaks in a gentler tone. Focusing specifically on his own Catholic Church tradition, the author, James McEvoy, a theologian-priest from Adelaide, sees the way of dialogue as the most effective approach for human interaction, but above all for the church in its relationship with others in the world of today. Itself having taken in the past an adversarial stance towards those of different belief, the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council, as this book shows, chose a new path, the way of dialogic engagement. Not so much focused on dialogue within the church (although that is a major implication), this book proposes dialogue as the most effective means through which the Catholic Church can fulfil its mission of engagement with a complex world.
The author sets out two questions that guide his study: how can the shifting place of religion in the West be best understood? And, within this changed situation, how is the church's relationship to the world to be best conceived? To guide him in exploring the first question, McEvoy turns...