When I was a child, I accepted my father as a force of imagination that flared and coruscated, an instrument of transformation. During the Second World War, he had survived a Japanese bullet, and he had a scar to prove it. "If my heart had been going this way instead of that," he announced once, rowing me across a lake in the Adirondacks, "you would never have existed!" It was a joke, of course, but it was also the text of a lesson that endured throughout our life together.

Mainline Protestant denominations continue their plunge downward through mediocrity to total irrelevance. No surprise there. Evangelical churches continue to grow-especially those of the non-denominational variety. Again, no surprise. Roman Catholicism is declining more quickly than any other "faith tradition" in America. Again, not a huge surprise.

Her description of him comes as a shock to many of us. The man that so many of us knew and admired was a man of enormous personal courage, a passionate, articulate, and tireless champion of the poor, the disenfranchised and the most desperately helpless in society. He was all that, but as Ms Moore tells us there was another side to him, a man who led a secret double life.

An Anglican Prayer Book (2008) goes back to the practices of the 1950s when only licensed lay persons were permitted to perform these functions, acting as assistants to the priest instead of ministers of the worshiping assembly. Instead of giving the laity a greater role in the liturgy, which, after all, is the work of the laos, the people of God, An Anglican Prayer Book (2008) reduces their role.