Neville relays a story told to him by his friend Rosy, who grew up on the poorer side of a religiously and ethnically divided neighborhood: every school day as a boy, Rosy had to run a two- or three-hundred-yard gauntlet through the rival block while people threw tomatoes and worse at him. Neville uses it to make the point that such prejudice -- Italian against Jew, Protestant against Catholic -- did not end sixty years ago; it persists into the present, just as most people still fail to recognize that the Jesus of scripture is their own Imagination rather than a man who lived once, long ago.