'What inspires this reflection is a sense of bafflement. Why has the age-old teaching of the Catholic Church that serious sinners who die unrepentant will go to Hell, which seemed all important in my youth and preoccupied Catholics of my generation, been forgotten?' When novelist, biographer and historian Piers Paul Read turns his attention to religious affairs he can usually be guaranteed to provoke delight and fury in equal measure. This collection draws together new material with a selection of his most elegant and memorable essays and reviews, on subjects ranging from liberation theology, The Da Vinci Code and Graham Greene to sexual desire, feminism and Pope Benedict XVI.