AN AMERICAN CONVERSION: ONE MAN's DISCOVERY OF BEAUTY AND TRUTH IN TIMES OF CRISIS by Deal W. Hudson

Crossroad, 2003 189 pages, $22.95 Available in retail and online bookstores.

“Converts are often asked to tell their stories,” writes Deal Hudson, well known as publisher of Crisis magazine and a commentator on culture and religion. “There are good reasons for telling them as well as a few bad ones. I am telling mine now to challenge readers to recognize the necessity of ongoing conversion in their own lives.”

So begins An American Conversion, Hudson's story of his journey from the Baptist tradition to the Catholic faith. Hudson's life as a Christian began in the 1960s when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior as an 18-year-old philosophy student at the University of Texas. He would soon find it difficult to sustain that mixture of devout evangelical-Protestant faith and passion for intellectual life and the arts.

More than once he was warned that his scholarly pursuits could lead him away from a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Fully committed to both the Baptist tradition and the study of philosophy, Hudson decided to attend Princeton Theological Seminary because it offered courses in philosophy, the history of doctrine and the arts. “In fact,” he writes, “my visit to a local Southern Baptist seminary confirmed my intuition that the Baptist commitment to education was shackled by anything that was not explicitly tied to the study of Scripture. This fear was often refracted through a pompous denial of the arts and philosophy.”

While working with youth at the local Baptist assembly, Hudson would often use movies, theater and the arts in presenting the Gospel message. When these “suspect” activities proved upsetting to many, Hudson realized something had to give. The breaking point came when he decided to go to Pittsburgh to visit a friend, whom he had not yet met in person, who shared his love for the music of English composer Frederick Delius.

Hudson visited his musical friend but never “witnessed” to him. Upon his return, he told a Baptist friend about what had (or hadn't) happened. “Once again I was informed of my probably eternal resting place and of my musical friend's as well. In the car on the way back to Princeton I wept.”

Hudson soon began reading works by St. Augustine, including his Confessions and On The Trinity, both of which opened up doors to theological and philosophical insights he had not considered before.

Hudson's interest in Thomistic philosophy and the work of Jacques Maritain drew him even closer to the Catholic Church. A written correspondence with Catholic historian Dr. James Hitchcock helped answer questions about Church history and the role of the Second Vatican Council. When Hudson finally entered the Church, he took as his patron saint Thomas Aquinas: “I now bore his name, he was a part of me.”

Written with brevity and simple elegance, An American Conversion yields insights into the nature and appeal of fundamentalism, the meaning of happiness, the place of beauty, the necessity of philosophy and the place of the natural-law tradition of the Catholic Church. But the focus always returns to conversion: “I am still converting, no longer from evangelicalism, but from the stubborn self-regard that we all share in our fallen human nature. Conversion never ends, even for those who have always felt at home in the Church.”

A cradle Catholic could not have said it better.

Carl E. Olson, author of Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, writes from Eugene, Oregon.