James Alison’s latest collection of essays and addresses is as stimulating as ever, containing many refreshing explorations of scriptural passages, and full of humanity and wit (I loved the way he used the famous composer Rossini, in chapter 2!). His debt to the writings of René Girard comes across clearly, and I must say he helps me at least to begin to grasp the meaning of Girard’s notions of ‘mimetic desire’ and the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ (and its undoing). He writes passionately about being gay, as a “regularly occurring minority variant in the human condition, rather than a vice or pathology.” Despite Alison’s evident love for the Church as ‘God’s way of giving us eternal life’, he has come to believe that “the current characterisation of gay people held by the Roman congregations is not true” (page 57