Peace at Last.

An audio introduction to Tony Daniels' review of Last Words by Richard Holloway, from The Salisbury Review.

Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, has spent years speaking openly about the loss of his Christian faith. In Last Words, written in his tenth decade, he looks back without the bitterness that often accompanies a public change of belief.

Tony Daniels' review follows both the argument and the life. Holloway describes the familiar obstacles to faith: the immensity of the universe, undeserved suffering, the puzzle of a first cause, and the incompatible certainties of rival religions. Yet he also understands what belief gives people: consolation, meaning and an answer to the terror that suffering might be arbitrary.

The more affecting material concerns Holloway's childhood in industrial Scotland. His family lived with cold water, cramped rooms and an outside lavatory, but he remembers love, nature and communal warmth. Daniels resists easy nostalgia while noticing something planners often miss: improvements that can be counted do not replace relationships that cannot.

He is not uncritical. Some of Holloway's poetry receives a sharp verdict. But the review's governing quality is respect. Daniels finds a man with whom disagreement need not curdle into contempt, and suggests that such amiability has become rare.

The result is a review about more than apostasy or old age. It asks what remains when certainty has gone: gratitude, memory, affection, and perhaps a quieter kind of peace.

Read Peace at Last by Tony Daniels at salisburyreview.com.