This section on forgiveness is the most compelling in the book as it rigorously grapples with the burden of expectations forgiveness can impose, especially on Indigenous people; the way it can be weaponised by abusers; the healing chemistry of restorative justice; and the mental health benefits of forgiving and being forgiven.

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There can be no questioning the sentiments of Bright Shining, its longing for a world governed by the better angels of our nature and its rousing call for each of us to allow grace to drive our actions. I do, however, have some reservations about the inner logic of the book. While it has more structural coherence than Baird’s previous work, the bestselling Phosphorescence, there are still whole chapters, her ode to the fire of teenage girls, for instance, that have only a tenuous relationship to the main theme and feel shoe-horned in.

At the level of argument, there is also a puzzling logic at play. While making a case for “moral beauty”, Baird’s first impulse is to reach for “proof” of its validity and value by citing scientific studies. This hunger for certainty, this impulse to nail a state that by its nature cannot be nailed leads her, on occasions, into the realm of pseudo-science.

The most striking example is when she canvasses the attempts by an early 20th-century doctor to prove the existence of the soul by weighing a human body before and immediately after death, concluding that the soul weighed 21.3 grams. While noting that these findings were met with scepticism, Baird never questions the premise that the soul might be something that can be measured in this way.

Towards the end of the book, she observes that “science can’t easily measure grace, largely because ineffability and mystery are core to grace”. But, she adds, many are beginning to try, citing a Franciscan priest who writes of the energy in the space between atomic particles and between planets and the stars. “Likewise, grace occurs in the space between people,” says Baird. Absolutely. But this is not a statement of scientific fact, it is science as metaphor.

The uplift and power of Bright Shining has little to do with scientific evidence. It is to be found in the way she gives grace fresh currency by bringing this beautiful and elusive condition from the theological margins into the mainstream and showing, with passion and verve, how quietly transformative it can be.

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