Select Works of Thomas Howard (10 vols.)

Contrasting the Christian and secular worldviews, Thomas Howard refreshes our minds with the illuminated view of Christianity as it imbued the world in times past—showing that we cannot live meaningful lives without this Christian understanding. This volume presents an inspiring defense of Christianity, and a stirring critique of secularism.

Many consider T.S. Eliot to be the most important poet of the twentieth century, and Four Quartets to be his greatest achievement. Dove Descending is a journey into the beauties and depths of Eliot’s masterpiece written by Thomas Howard, bestselling author, professor and critic.

In this first in-depth exposition of Eliot’s masterwork, Howard unravels the complexities of the poem with line-by-line commentary. Having taught the poem often during his decades as an English professor, Howard developed a deep understanding of the concepts found in Four Quartets. His love for the poem, and authoritative scholarship on T.S. Eliot, make this volume indispensable for literary readers.

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.

Thomas Howard shows that every room of your house—the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, and even the bathroom—is a holy place where God’s grace awaits you. In each room—with wonderful insights—Howard reveals how, in your daily activities you can meet the same God who came to Israel in the terror, smoke, and fire in the Tabernacle, and the God who died for us on the cross. Howard sees chances to love and serve God in the most seemingly dull and ordinary of places and actions.

Find out how cooking and cleaning, having family dinners together, and all the other commonplace actions that make up the fabric of your daily life can actually disclose God’s presence to you. Your daily life as well as your devotional life will be forever transformed by this unusual look at how lovingly God awaits us even in the smallest things.

Distractions, fatigue, and boredom at Sunday worship—maybe we experience these because we don’t fully appreciate what’s going on at Mass. Thomas Howard’s profound and practical look at the liturgy focuses our wandering minds. It reminds us that at Mass the veil separating earth and heaven lifts, so that we stand with angels and saints in the presence of God.

Through his prolific and highly regarded writing, Thomas Howard’s name is familiar to Protestants and Catholics alike, but many have never heard the story of his conversion to Catholicism. With grace, charm, and wit, Howard describes his journey from Evangelicalism to Anglicanism, and finally, to the Church of Rome. In a world saturated with fashionable unbelief, Howard’s testimony inspires and informs. Fr. Richard Neuhaus, who contributes a foreword, calls it “a marvelously engaging remembrance.”

Regarded as one of the foremost authorities on the fiction of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Howard offers brilliant new insights into Lewis’ fiction. Focusing on Narnia, the space trilogy, and Till We Have Faces, Howard explores with remarkable clarity the moral vision in the imaginary world of the master storyteller, C.S. Lewis.

Thomas Howard presents his wonderful, refreshing insights on the “glad tidings” of the deeper meaning of Catholic piety, dogma, spirituality, vision, and practice, rendered in his unique and well-known style of prose. The book’s chapters take the form of lay meditations on Catholic teaching and practice, opening up in practical and simple terms the richness at work in virtually every detail of Catholic prayer, piety, liturgy, and experience.

Thomas Howard has never been one to shy away from controversy. While attending the Evangelical Church of his parents and teaching English at an Evangelical college, Howard wrote his provocative best seller Evangelical Is Not Enough. Soon after entering the Anglican Communion, Howard began asking the kinds of questions that would eventually lead him into the Roman Catholic Church.

Throughout his pilgrimage of faith, Howard wrote numerous thought-provoking yet respectful articles on a wide range of topics for both Protestant and Catholic publications, gaining him a wide and loyal following. Known for his wit and charm, Howard also was a sought after speaker for conferences and college graduations. This volume collects much of Howard’s best material.

Liturgical reform and sacred architecture, women’s ordination and hierarchical authority, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien—these and many other topics of interest to Protestants and Catholics alike are tackled by Howard with his characteristic thoughtfulness in these articles and speeches that span more than 20 years of his prolific career.

This is a timely book about the unique mixture of human and spiritual experiences that make up life in a great, complex city, confronting tensions that are timeless and ubiquitous.

Thomas Howard reveals his unique writing gifts and original insights recalling the amazing variety of experiences he had living as a young married man in New York City. His wide-eyed response to the twinkling kaleidoscope of New York—opera, ballet, dining, sports, social life—plays off against an increasingly strong awareness that the hidden mysteries of domestic fidelity, marriage, fatherhood, and routine duties, are at the center of the whirl of New York life.