Public interest in religious debate in the UK and USA has recently been fed by a series of books of popular polemic against theism, religion and the discipline of theology itself. A small industry has grown up around these works- Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens- which have complained not just of their theological illiteracy but also of their tendency to conflate religious belief with fundamentalism and their contribution to a public atmosphere of anti pluralist hostility to the expression of `faith positions`. The atmosphere in Britain of aggressive secularism contrasts sharply with a public cultur