This is the remarkable second editorial in today's Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Religion seems much on America's mind. What else is new? A Newsweek cover story, "The End of Christian America," provoked debate and consternation. Critics who likened the article to an attack on Christianity either misread the piece or read it without clarity and, for that matter, without charity. The author, Jon Meacham, identifies himself as a Christian, albeit a "poor" one, which places him among the multitudes, including the writer of these words. Then there is the controversy regarding Notre Dame, Barack Obama, and an honorary degree. Accusations have been traded regarding another movie based on another comic novel by Dan "Da Vinci Code" Brown. Editors of Britain's Economist have published a book about religion's resiliency. God Is Back proclaims the title, a prospect a reviewer in The New York Times evidently considers appalling.

Two new books have kept us occupied. In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart discusses "The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies." An Orthodox theologian, Hart writes with elegance. Even his invective has style. Try this: "The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God Is Not Great, a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method." Hart examines the so-called new atheists, and finds them wanting. How could they be otherwise? The culture cannot even produce what Hart calls "profound unbelief." Belief can be banal as well, yes it can.

Atheist Delusions is not simply a broadside or a witty counterpunch but also something of an apologetic. Hart sings beautifully of the mysteries and of what happens when communion reunites. His focus falls not on religion generally or on a vague spirituality but on Christianity, whose central claim he calls the "most subversive" in the whole of human history. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" and was crucified and is risen indeed.

William Murchison's Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity disappoints. Murchison, a retired senior columnist with the Dallas Morning News who earned national admiration for his editorial stewardship, addresses the well-documented decline in mainline Protestantism, with specific attention paid to his home, the Episcopal Church. He cites various trends in the denomination itself, as well as trends in the church's relations to the secular world, that have driven distressed congregants from the pews. Subjects include alterations in the Prayer Book (not only in grammar but in content), reparations to African-Americans, homosexuality, and the late Bishop Jim Pike. The ordination of women, in Murchison's indictment, may be the original folly from which much mischief flows. Our editor disagrees. Many are they who, sitting on the knees, with great gladness take bread and wine consecrated by merciful women of the cloth, whose souls magnify their Lord.

Sourness undermines Murchison's plea. The tone wearies. The Eucharist receives scant treatment, and, as a noun, even suffers a sneer. Oh dear. Children, the candle burns; the light glows. At the rail division disappears. Despite all the changes, favored or ill, affecting the church, for many believers communion is now, and forever will stay, "the most loved and solemn act of Christian worship." Theology comes in tomes and in tracts; yet as vital as scholarly exercises might be, in the end, or, more precisely, in the beginning, Christian theology boils down to two words: Imitate Christ. Which is to say, remember. Be.