Thanks to the reader who pointed out another terrific review of that book on the King James Bible – this time by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. The conclusion?

“The New English Bible, as T.S. Eliot wrote when it appeared, “astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.” The King James Bible, by contrast, astonishes in its combination of the majestic, the singular and the exalting. That it has been replaced in most English-speaking Christian congregations by “modern” translations of surpassing mediocrity is one of the outrages of the age and one that says all too much about the age itself.”

Indeed it does, and to this long-lapsed member of the C of E, today’s tawdry texts are yet another reminder of how that once great national church has been reduced to slush, and to mush and to gush, as its ragbag collection of down at heel Bishops preside over a clergy of whom the defining characteristics are incoherence, sentimental piety, and pointless erudition.