Florence Henderson made a big impression on me in my late teens. This vivacious New Yorker was stimulating, funny and challenging. She belonged to a Roman Catholic lay women's movement called The Grail, and some friends and I would drop in to their Edinburgh base for a chat. These were heady days in religious as well as cultural terms: Pope John XXIII and John "bigger than Jesus" Lennon, Vatican II and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Honest to God and John Profumo. Established orthodoxies were under pressure.

Florence Henderson made a big impression on me in my late teens. This vivacious New Yorker was stimulating, funny and challenging. She belonged to a Roman Catholic lay women's movement called The Grail, and some friends and I would drop in to their Edinburgh base for a chat. These were heady days in religious as well as cultural terms: Pope John XXIII and John "bigger than Jesus" Lennon, Vatican II and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Honest to God and John Profumo. Established orthodoxies were under pressure.

After going to university, I lost touch with Florence. A few years later her name suddenly appeared in the newspaper headlines: she had married Father Charles Davis, one of the finest Roman Catholic theologians in the UK. It created a sensation, the more so because Davis was known as a thoughtful and canny man. Even though he had been protesting against what he saw as the infantilisation of the laity, he didn't look, or sound, like a rebel. Now he was a layman, too. He and Florence made their home in Quebec, where the good professor continued to teach theology.

I was intrigued, then, when I got word about a book by a woman called Claire Henderson Davis. Could it be? Yes. Down in Edinburgh to cover both Festival Fringe theatre and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I went to the book launch in the Grassmarket and met the daughter of the late Charles and Florence Davis.

Claire's book is extraordinary. After the Church: Divine Encounter in a Sexual Age is only 77 pages long, but every sentence in the beautifully written book is worth reading. The author seeks to reconnect human stories with fresh interpretations of key stories of the Christian tradition, such as the Fall, the Tower of Babel, the Good Samaritan and the Incarnation. Being Christian, she feels, is more like falling and being in love than adhering to a code of rules.

"That's not to say that there's any easy way of connecting the Christian story to the present," she writes. "While the west has shifted to democracy, Christian churches still tolerate parent-childlike structures. The result, an enormous gulf between Christian apologia and the street talk of the west... The west has engaged in an important rebellion against the Church, but in order to mature, we need to reconnect. Not to embrace the Christian cult, but to know where we are in the plot, to take the story forward."

In other words, the stories which are part of the tradition may still have a lot to say to a generation which has a question mark where its soul used to be. Yet the author insists that the painfully dark side of the churches' authorised version needs to be part of the total contemporary narrative if integrity is to be maintained. Claire Henderson Davis is her mother and father's daughter.

On next to St George's West Church, where a one-man show, Bigger than Jesus, is packing them in on the Festival Fringe. Canadian actor Rick Miller uses the structure of the Mass to reflect anarchically and respectfully on the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth today. Like Davis, Miller wants to invite people behind "Churchianity" and engage with the foundational myths in innovative ways.

It seems that the west doesn't know what to do with its ancient Christian tradition. The vocal new militant atheism is clear: ditch it, and grow up. Militant fundamentalism is also unequivocal: embrace literalism or die. Then again, there are also various brands of ethereal spiritualism on offer. Personally, I find these options quite resistible. Davis and Miller and those like them are pointing to a different way: sit loose with ecclesiastical structures that have the smell of death about them while mining fresh treasures from a rich living tradition - one which offers subversive resources for living in self-obsessed consumerist times. Make the journey from the human to the divine via new interpretations of old transformational stories. Eschew both fundamentalism and knit-your-own spirituality and engage with something rooted in a long history that has more depth.

Scotland has sold its Presbyterian and Catholic silver far too cheaply. Lazy writers gain easy applause by denouncing a Calvinism they have neither read nor understood. Surely we can have a more intelligent and serious dialogue with the fathers and (neglected) mothers of the faith?

Some of the old Christian songs are tired, lifeless and even dangerous. But there are other lyrics which, whether sung to Gregorian chant or danced to a wild jazz, can engage both heart and mind in life-affirming ways. The need is for new, generous, unauthorised versions of holy and unholy writ.