Here is a fabulous phrase from Cardinal Ivan Dias, the Vatican's Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, who made a very recent splash in some British newspapers when he remarked that some Western churches live "myopically in the fleeting present". Whatever the Cardinal may have intended by the remark--it seems it was a dig at British Anglicanism--his remark can be read also as a pungent critique of North American Evangelicalism that more often than not is quite happy to forget the past and bask in "the fleeting present."