demic (with deep, unsettling effects), this book offers an intelligent, traditional, and yet unpredictable account of five basic Christian beliefs that can help us, not to return to a previous Christian comfort zone, but to rediscover old truths as if for the first time. Victor Lee Austin starts with the belief in God as Creator, which, Austin says, is the beginning of an adventure. The second basic Christian claim is sin, which oddly is not something substantial but rather a hole in reality. Third is that God is active in the mess of things; fourth, that God has shown, in Jesus, what a real human being is. Finally, this adventure is throughout an ongoing discovery that in Jesus Christ people have their true friend.