Boeve's book is broken into three main parts that reflect the book's subtitle, and includes an insightful conclusion on the surprising resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Benedict, Boeve claims, experienced enough “cognitive dissonance” between his vision for the Catholic Church and the reality of the actual Catholic Church that it may have led implicitly to a paradoxical situation in which his resignation was perhaps, even if symbolically, the only way to resolve the tension. Boeve's call for a Catholic Church that takes seriously its own call to repentance and conversion—hence one that is willing to see its own failings on display before it—is argued as the only path forward, one that Benedict failed to see. Boeve's realistic vision of a “poorer and humbler church,” to my mind, gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the essays collected here, which attempt to do what Benedict could not do: find dialogue as the answer to what many perceive as a dissonance that cannot be overcome.

In the first part of the book, Boeve discusses how the church exists both at the margins of society and simultaneously at a crossroads where multiple discourses meet. In the midst of a plurality of identities and communities, religions and scientific conversations, theology must learn to be a marginal discourse within each of these settings, not the dominant one that has guided European history for so long and colonized so much of the remaining world. Starting with his home context of Belgium and the increasingly secular culture of Europe, Boeve displays an adept sense of the issues of contextualization that theology faces. He outlines accordingly how theology has something important to contribute to the conversations that take place in the scientific setting of a modern university, within the life of the church where it is often contentiously held (as he discusses in an essay on the International Theological Commission's document “Theology Today”), and in an increasingly secularized society at the same time.

By taking an in-depth look in the volume's second part at the relationship of theology to philosophy and of theology to religious studies from the perspective of university discourse today, Boeve articulates a vision for theological discourse involving “difficult dialogues” and “productive tensions” alike. Although such dialogues are one of the guiding theses of this book, they offer no easy answers, and so theology must probe the depths of each, and whatever context it finds itself immersed in, in order to maintain its relevance.

The three chapters that comprise the third part of the book all revolve around a theme introduced in one of the first chapters, which focused on plurality and difference in our world today. Christianity seeks an “open narrative” that refuses to foreclose the activity of revelation in our world and is open to dialogue with other religious traditions and atheisms standing before the church. The significance of such claims is on display in his essay “Catholic Identity in a Post-Christian and Post-Secular Society,” but also in essays dealing with the issue of pluralism in Catholic schools oriented toward dialogue today as well as the relevance and plausibility of Catholic religious education.

When is the church at its best? Boeve's answer: precisely where we find “the development of a reflexive-hermeneutical Christian faith capable of giving an account of the current religious situation and able to handle detraditionalization, individualization, and pluralization” (76). The Catholic Church must, Boeve points out, learn the strength of recontextualizing its narrative in each global, national, and regional context where it finds itself.

It is a major strength of this collection that Boeve is able to open up a series of complex conversations without being reductionistic toward the various discourses that theology seeks to address. If one finishes the book with the sense that the difficult conversations needing to be had in the university, the church, and society are really just beginning, then this is perhaps as it should be. There is so much dialogue to be had, and this insightful documentation of what it will take to bring a plurality of voices into conversation with one another is the right place to start.