This is a unique tale of one man's spiritual adventure, tracing God's unusual plan of providence from 1950s America to England and back again. Dwight Longenecker's conversion story is a roller coaster ride through fundamentalism, Oxford, Cambridge, and the modern Catholic Church.

Brought up in an Evangelical Protestant home, he attended the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, and continued his education by studying theology at Oxford University before being ordained as an Anglican minister, serving as a curate, a school chaplain in Cambridge, and a country parson on the Isle of Wight.

Realizing that he and the Anglican Church were on divergent paths, in 1995 Longenecker and his family were received into the Catholic Church in England. For ten years they continued to live in England where he worked as a freelance writer and charity worker. Then in 2006 the door opened to return to the United States and be ordained as a Catholic priest.

This story of one man's amazing journey from Protestant fundamentalism through the Church of England to the Catholic priesthood offers an inspiring tale of God's providence, and the truth that "all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose."

C. S. Lewis and Ronald Knox were two of the most popular authors of Christian apologetics in the twentieth century ... and for many years they were neighbors in Oxford. In Second Friends, Milton Walsh delves into their writings and compares their views on a variety of compelling topics, such as the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the problem of suffering, miracles, the way of Love, the role of religion in society, prayer, and more. They both bring to the conversation a passionate love of truth, clarity of thought, and a wonderful wit.

Lewis and Knox both experienced powerful conversions to the Christian faith, an important aspect that Walsh covers in detail. Both wrote about their conversion experiences because they wanted to explain to others why they took that life-changing step. They each valued logical thinking, and they professed that the Christian faith should be embraced, not only because it is good, but because it is true. Reason provides the intellectual foundation of belief for both authors.

For both these apologists, Christianity is much more than a doctrinal system: it is above all a personal relationship with Christ that entails romance, struggle, and loyalty. A common adjective applied to Lewis and Knox as writers was “imaginative”. They saw lack of imagination as a great hurdle to faith, and they believed that imagination is a privileged path leading to a deeper apprehension of the truth.

Lewis and Knox, while convinced that the Christian faith rested on sound reason and that it fulfilled the deepest human longings, also knew that God is a mystery—and so is the human heart. In the face of these twin mysteries, Milton Walsh shows that both men approached their evangelizing efforts in a spirit of humility, as he explores how they appealed to the mind, the heart, and the imagination in presenting the Christian faith.

“It is a great delight to see that Fr. Milton Walsh has brought together the incomparable Knox and the indomitable Lewis in a way that enables us to understand both of them better.”
—Joseph Pearce Author, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church

“This—to quote C.S.Lewis—‘is the most noble and joyous book I’ve read these ten years.’… This book has led me deeper into Lewis’s own writings than any I’ve read.”
—Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis’ former secretary and biographer

Illustrated

This Vision book for youth tells the beautiful story of American's recently canonized saint and servant of the oppressed, St. Katharine Drexel. Born in 1858 to Francis and Emma Drexel, Katharine grew up in a happy, devout, and wealthy Catholic family in Philadelphia. Her parents were greatly loved and admired by many for their kindness and generosity to the poor and needy.

After the death of her parents the young Katharine decided to use all the fortune she had inherited to help the less fortunate in America, especially the Indians and African Americans. Acting upon the words she had heard come from a statue of Our Lady, "Freely you have received, freely give", and from the direct advice given her by Pope Leo XIII to become a missionary, Katharine Drexel became a religious sister and founded the order of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891. Mother Katharine and her sisters worked tirelessly to serve the material and spiritual needs of the downtrodden through numerous schools and institutions she established around the country. She died in 1955, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2001.

It is two years after the events in Canadian Summer. The Mitchells are settled in their new home, Friendly Gables-and twins have just been added to the family. With Mother recovering from the births and with other changes in the household, the children must come to terms with themselves in new ways. Joan's first dance; Patsy loses her glasses; Peter's disastrous fight; Angela's misadventure in the woods; Timmy's "good news"; and Catherine's brush with fire -are only a few of the incidents in the life of this busy, growing family. With her usual humor and compassion, the author brings the Mitchell "trilogy" to a satisfying close. Illustrated by the author.