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Law and Religion in Europe: A Comparative Introduction

imagination in C.S Lewis, and two essays (Alison Milbank and Donna J. Lazenby), which are devoted to the explication of literary texts. Once one has passed into the second half of the book, it is more difficult to see what part the imagination plays in the apologetics of the writers – even if one accepts the broad definition of its workings suggested by the editor in his introduction. Can these essays really be called ‘imaginative’? With the exception of Graham Ward’s wide-ranging piece on cultural hermeneutics, full of telling up-to-the minute allusions to facets of contemporary life, most of these essays do not seem to differ greatly in style or argument from the more conventional kind of apologetics that we have been told it is the intention of this volume to go beyond. This is not to deny the excellence of some of these contributions. Stephen Bullivant draws some interesting inferences from unexpected passages in Gaudium et Spes and Alister McGrath provides us with a concise – and characteristically masterly – essay on the interface between Theology and the Natural Sciences; a model of incisive observation and clear argument. But one cannot help feeling a little disappointed, given the title of the book and the claims of the editor. One is left with a sense that much more could have been said; that these authors have not seriously investigated, in their own fields, the ways in which the distinctive qualities and capacities of the imagination could have illuminated and enriched their efforts at providing a reasonable defence of Christianity in an increasingly hostile world.