Recognizing the Church
A Personal Pilgrimage & the Discovery of Five Marks of the Church
by Thomas Howard
I was brought up in an Evangelical household. To say this is to say something good. My father was a layman, not a preacher; but he was a devoted and assiduous daily student of the Bible. He and my mother exist to this day in my imagination as the very icons of the godly man and woman. It was a wonderful thing—that sage, earnest, transparent, Bible-centered faith. I owe the fact that I am a believer today, and that my whole pilgrimage, steep and tortuous as it has been sometimes, has been towards the center, not away from it, to the faith and prayers and example of my father and mother.
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Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).
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