Monday, August 30, 2010

Evangelical Catholic converts: a look back

Twenty years ago I wrote the following review of a book about evangelical converts to the Catholic Faith. I cannot remember whether it was before or after my own reception into the Church in 1993, though I'm inclined to think I wrote it around 1990 when I was an associate prof at Lenoir-Rhyne University (then College) in North Carolina. It was never published, and I had forgotten about it until I ran across an old file preserved on a flash drive. It is reproduced here simply as a record of my own interests and thinking at the time. As some of the principal contributors (Dale Vree, Sheldon Vanauken, Tom Howard, Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy, John Michael Talbot, Pat Boone's daughter Cherry Boone O'Neill, etc.) may be household names to at least some of you, I expect it could be of some interest as well. Note that although I refer to these as "evangelicals," they come from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, from the once Reformed, then Neo-Marxist Dale Vree to the once neo-pagan Sheldon Vanauken who came to Rome via C.S. Lewis at Oxford. All very interesting. The book is:
Dan O'Neill, ed., The New Catholics: Contemporary Converts Tell Their Stories,with a Foreword by Walker Percy (Crossroad, 1989, pp. xv + 187; $8.95 [1990 prices!] paperback).
The review is posted at "The New Catholics" (Book Notices, August 30, 2010).

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