International Gold Winner of the Readers’ Choice Book Awards (What Light Was), author Shawn Callaway Hays delivers Within the Parable. Within the Parable is a rigorous and original contribution to the philosophy of religion, offering a sophisticated structural defense of the meaningfulness of theistic statements. Positioned within the context of mid-20th-century debates about religious epistemology—most notably Antony Flew's falsification challenge—Hays revives and significantly expands upon I.M. Crombie’s underexamined response in the 1955 symposium Theology and Falsification. Drawing deeply from Crombie’s essay and extending it into an elaborate framework, Hays crafts a theory of “dual parentage” that distinguishes between the Logical Mother and Logical Father of religious belief. This dichotomy enables Hays to reframe the perennial problem of religious language, especially how God-talk can be both meaningful and non-anthropomorphic. The Logical Mother, in Hays’ account, refers to the pre-predicative, experiential origin of belief—the affective and sometimes mystical cognition that provides the term “God” with meaningful content. Drawing on thinkers such as Schleiermacher, William James, and Rudolf Otto, Hays carefully traces how religious experience operates as a form of undifferentiated a non-inferential, pre-conceptual, yet epistemically viable intuition of divinity. In contrast, the Logical Father functions interpretively, assigning authoritative predicates through the structures of religious language, primarily as shaped by the Christian tradition’s revelatory claims—especially the Incarnation. What makes Hays’ work exceptional is its systematic integration of Wittgensteinian language-game theory, classical natural theology, modern epistemology, and theological revelation. Through this fusion, he defends a nuanced theory in which religious statements have a bifurcated the subject term “God” derives its content from existential experience (Logical Mother), while the predicates (e.g., “loving,” “just,” “creator”) gain communicative value via interpretive frameworks rooted in revelatory authority (Logical Father). This structural model, Hays argues, avoids the pitfalls of anthropomorphism and conceptual incoherence while preserving the epistemic and affective force of religious belief. In six major sections, including deep engagements with Wittgenstein, Aquinas, Barth, Alston, and Tillich, Hays constructs a typology of religious language that spans from experiential immediacy to authoritative revelation. The final synthesis—the “union of the dual parentage function”—posits that a full religious utterance about God (e.g., “God is love”) is intelligible only when its two sources are acknowledged and properly one existentially encountered, the other communicatively interpreted. More than a commentary or application of Crombie’s forgotten thesis, Within the Parable offers a meta-philosophical structure for understanding how religious beliefs can be meaningful, communicable, and defensible without relying solely on empirical verification or abstract metaphysical proof. It is a masterful philosophical work that will interest scholars of theology, analytic philosophy, and religious language—bridging emotional phenomenology and logical analysis in a rare and compelling synthesis.