With familiar candour and colour, John Bodycomb excoriates church leadership for evading, and layering over with
platitudes, two huge questions: • What future for organised religion in Western societies? and (in light of this)
• What future for the so-called 'religious professional'? Fifty years a sociologist of religion, specialising in the ups and downs of organised religion, Bodycomb is plain-spoken and provocative. Institutional Christianity as we have known it began to decline 600 years ago, and with it a model of religious professional. We are entering a new era, in which people must still make sense of existence with some kind of meaning system — but the old ones are obsolete. The defenders of tradition, theologians, institutional power brokers and thought police will hate 'Two Elephants', he predicts.
