Lead, Kindly Light: My Journey To Rome

Rating:
Summary: Scintillating, Cheerful, Intelligent
Review: Thomas Howard, an academician of Fundamentalist background, details his religious journey through high-church Anglicanism and ultimately to the Roman Catholic Church at age fifty. It is, as he notes in a foreword, not an unfamiliar story: the venerable Cardinal Newman, and the late Msgr Ronald Knox among others have written nobly in this vein. But please do read Thomas Howard who is, I would venture to say, the ablest writer of English prose alive in the world today. We say this not merely for the Audenesque capacity of his vocabulary, the Scarlatti-like elegance of each paragraph, or the luminously well-reasoned arguments he advances in favour of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . but also (and most especially) for his good humour and his charity toward those in the Protestant world with whom he has parted company.

On the seventy-second page, Dr Howard describes his reception into the Ecclesia in an amusing, smile-inducing fashion; he is in the process of realizing that ethnic homogeneity (thank God!) is not one of the marks of the Catholic Church. "This is what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like." No preferential option for the lettered, for the laurelled, for the European, for the successful.

It is the beauty of the Church Fathers, the "next generation" after the Apostles, that leads him more than anything into Catholicity. Their writings -- those of Ignatius, Polycarp, Origen, et al. -- are described as "titanic" and "luminous." If they were in error, as the fundamentalists would claim, then their error was infinitely wiser than the truths that Howard had known.

But again, the story is familiar; please do read this book (in conjunction, perhaps with Howard's "Evangelical is Not Enough") for the scintillant, effervescent, joyful, good-humoured prose -- the very endearing style in which the tale is told.

Rating:
Summary: Scintillating, Cheerful, Intelligent
Review: Thomas Howard, an academician of Fundamentalist background, details his religious journey through high-church Anglicanism and ultimately to the Roman Catholic Church at age fifty. It is, as he notes in a foreword, not an unfamiliar story: the venerable Cardinal Newman, and the late Msgr Ronald Knox among others have written nobly in this vein. But please do read Thomas Howard who is, I would venture to say, the ablest writer of English prose alive in the world today. We say this not merely for the Audenesque capacity of his vocabulary, the Scarlatti-like elegance of each paragraph, or the luminously well-reasoned arguments he advances in favour of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . but also (and most especially) for his good humour and his charity toward those in the Protestant world with whom he has parted company.

On the seventy-second page, Dr Howard describes his reception into the Ecclesia in an amusing, smile-inducing fashion; he is in the process of realizing that ethnic homogeneity (thank God!) is not one of the marks of the Catholic Church. "This is what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like." No preferential option for the lettered, for the laurelled, for the European, for the successful.

It is the beauty of the Church Fathers, the "next generation" after the Apostles, that leads him more than anything into Catholicity. Their writings -- those of Ignatius, Polycarp, Origen, et al. -- are described as "titanic" and "luminous." If they were in error, as the fundamentalists would claim, then their error was infinitely wiser than the truths that Howard had known.

But again, the story is familiar; please do read this book (in conjunction, perhaps with Howard's "Evangelical is Not Enough") for the scintillant, effervescent, joyful, good-humoured prose -- the very endearing style in which the tale is told.