Personal Picks - Patrick Madrid

By Stephen K. Ray
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those words, I'm sure he didn't have converts to the Catholic Church in mind, but his insight is the perfect metaphor for a recent phenomenon. A floodtide of Evangelical converts is surging into the Church, in numbers that grow dramatically each year. Many of them report that reading books like Rome Sweet Home, and Surprised by Truth was decisive in their becoming Catholic. Why do they convert? What doctrinal and spiritual struggles do they face? These and other questions are answered in this stupendous new book by Steve Ray, a convert from Evangelicalism. It's actually two books in one. The dramatic and moving conversion story is the main theme, but the juicy footnotes are a second book in themselves, providing a crash course in apologetics that covers sola scriptura, salvation, and the Eucharist. Crossing the Tiber is yet another "acorn" that will give rise to a forest of converts. (Softback, 284 pages, $12.95)

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense

By Suzette Haden Elgin
I got into my first serious fistfight when I was in the fourth grade. I say "serious" because a bloody nose was involved (I won't say whose). That's when I knew I'd rather defend myself with words, not fists. In apologetics, what you say is important, but how you say it makes all the difference. This book is a gold mine of advice on how to explain and defend a position effectively. It explains things like "The Twelve Rules" of clear, effective interaction; "how to understand and control your tone of voice so you can come across bolder and more assertive"; body language (facts and myths); and "what to do when you encounter a master of verbal manipulation who knows exactly what you're doing and does it right back at you." The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense has been in my apologetics library for years. I guarantee you'll be glad you added it to your own apologetics tool kit. (Hardback, 310 pages, $15.95)

On Being Catholic

By Thomas Howard
As you can see from his article in this issue of Envoy ("Catholic Is Not Enough"), Tom Howard is a man who thinks. He thinks and writes about God, life, religion, faith, and salvation the way they are, not the way we so often con ourselves into believing they are. In this elegant and powerful new book, Dr. Howard, a convert from Protestantism, reflects on how to be authentically Catholic. The Church and her vast panoply of saints, dogmas, liturgies, and sufferings unfolds before our eyes with stunning vividness. These luminous explanations are of the sort Frank Sheed once described as truly sane: "Sanity involves seeing what is. In relation to ourselves it means seeing what we are, where we are, what life is about . . . To come mentally to citizenship in the real world, that we might be at home in it, familiar with it knowing it's realities and its laws, knowing how to conduct ourselves in it." Before we can bring others back to the world of sanity, we must first make sure we ourselves live there. On Being Catholic is the perfect reality check. (Softback, 263 pages, $12.95)