I’m reading Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross and it’s a bad book. It’s an epitaph to Christianity in the UK. Ross is the new species of man described by C.S. Lewis in the Abolition of Man. There’s never any defense from Ross; it’s just a long apology.

The best quote for why Christianity must be defended comes from Rachel Morley of the Friends of Friendless Churches:

“These buildings transcend time. They are the spiritual investment and the artistic legacy of generations, and a community’s greatest expression of itself over centuries. There’s a concentration of shared human experience within their walls, which means that churches like this are a monument to the lives of thousands of ordinary people who have been completely forgotten about. This is their gift to the future. I think that’s really powerful, and we need to protect it.”

I don’t even know if Morley is religious, but it doesn’t matter because there’s at least one crumb in this book that isn’t suffocated by modernity.