Chaos and continuity
Luminaries praise Paula Fredriksen's Sin as gripping and magnificent. Her book on Augustine was both of these things. This one isn't.
church fathers
A sociologist might see in football a society's need to control and ritualize violence. The church fathers, however, weren't much for sociologists.
When black theologians focused on nontraditional and extra-Christian sources, white theologians had an excuse to ignore them. Not anymore.