I really, really enjoyed the first book of the trilogy, because Pullman has a lot of writing talent and he pulls off some very entertaining things in it. The second one posed more problems for me (primarily a bleakness that I felt would get worse, not better, and which I wasn't interested in reading) and I never bothered to read the third. Despite being a very lapsed Catholic, faith still has a role to play in my life (although I'm never sure from day to day just what that role is) and I felt very uncomfortable by the way things were heading.