This is not a badly crafted book, I just don't buy Oden's project. I think he is a lot more neo-orthodox than he cares to admit. But because he insists on not facing his neo-orthodoxy he ends up promoting a sort of romantic view of the past. I'm right with him for the need to read early Church writings, but it is modernity that allows us to read those things intelligently. As MacIntyre has shown us, there is not neutral place where we read these texts. So reading Augustine does not make you Augustinian. It does not give access to Augustine's formative world. What compounds the problem of romanticism is that scholarship since it is unavoidable to bring with us our world, our very modern world, into our interpretive action with the ancient text. To assume otherwise places these texts, in my opinion, at the same level as a devotional reading of scripture. ( )