Having grown up in a Catholic milieu in the 1950s, I am always slightly envious of friends who are converts from Protestant or evangelical churches and who speak with loving familiarity of the Bible (particularly the Old Testament.) As a child I knew about the saints and the sacraments but the Mass readings, as with the liturgy as a whole, were in Latin and the Bible was simply a collection of extraordinary stories: Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath and so on. My former evangelical friends had a different perspective; Scripture meant salvation history, a drama that intimately involved human beings from the beginning, and which was the bedrock of their faith.