Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament

In this deeply moving narrative, Thomas Howard describes his pilgrimage from evangelicalism—which he loves and reveres as the religion of his youth—to liturgical Christianity. Howard became a Roman Catholic in 1985. He describes evangelicalism with great sympathy and then examines more formal, liturgical worship with the freshness of someone discovering for the first time what his soul had always hungered for. Howard unfolds for us just what occurs in the vision and imagination of a Christian who, nurtured in the earnestness of Protestant evangelicalism, finds himself yearning for “whatever-it-is” that has been there in the Church for 2,000 years. It traces Howard’s soul-searching and shows why he believes the practices of the liturgical Church are an invaluable aid for any Christian’s spiritual life. This is a book of apologetics without polemics. Non-Catholics will gain an appreciation of the formal and liturgical side of Catholicism. Catholics will see with fresh eyes the beauty of their tradition. Worship, prayer, the Blessed Virgin, the Mass, and the liturgical year are taken one after the other, and what may have seemed routine and repetitive suddenly comes to life under the enchanting wand of Howard’s beautiful prose.