The USCCB meeting offers another opportunity to ditch a style of culture-war Catholicism that has failed to persuade even many of the faithful in the pews.
Even when produced with the most meticulous scholarship, our dictionaries ought to remind us that words exceed our best efforts at definition and classification.
Diarmid MacCulloch wants us to understand the religious beliefs of centuries ago in their own terms, however strange they may seem to modern secular sensibilities.