Marj Adams’s hostility towards Christianity is regularly ventilated in her TESS opinion columns (although one can only hope that her students are on the receiving end of a less belligerent pedagogy).

Yet, even by her usual splenetic standards, her latest offering (“A sermon everyone can do without”, June 20) reaches a new pitch of shrillness. Her use of “patriarchal” and “emasculate” give a clear hint as to which of her subjects - religious studies, philosophy and psychology - she would seem to prefer.

Whether or not she wishes to construe life and education as some sort of Freudian struggle is her own affair, but she needs to be more careful with her dissection of the issues. To reduce the contribution of Christianity to world civilisation and Scottish society to the default litany (if she will pardon the expression) of trial and contestation is a repudiation of both historical fact and current experience.

Doesn’t it occur to her that her repeated attempts to “put the boot into” Christianity smack of precisely the same sermonising tone she objects to elsewhere? Does Ms Adams have no sense of irony?

John Bollan, department of religious education, University of Glasgow.