Thomas Howard insists that every room of your house — the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, and even the bathroom — is a holy place where God’s grace awaits you, if only you know how to recognize His presence there. With a rich appreciation for the glories of God’s all-encompassing love, Howard shows you how to find Him in Splendor in the Ordinary. This beautifully written book takes you on a tour through your own home. In each room, Howard shows you the surprising ways you can meet God there. (He starts with the door and the walls!) With fervent devotion, his meditations encompass the experience of ancient Israel, who met God in terror and smoke and fire in the Tabernacle, and the sacrifice of Christ, which sanctifies the whole world. But they’re by no means confined to a lofty spiritual plane: Howard sees chances to love and serve God, and sees His gentle hand, in the most seemingly dull and ordinary of places and actions.
So take up this book to find out how cooking and cleaning, having family dinners together, and all the other commonplace actions that make up the fabric of your daily life can actually disclose God’s presence to you. Your daily life as well as your devotional life will be forever transformed by this unusual look at how lovingly God awaits us even in the smallest things.
Thomas Howard came early to the glories and rigors of Evangelical Protestantism, as both his father and grandfather were prominent Evangelical leaders. He struggled as a youth to reconcile the easy certainties of Evangelicalism with his broadening experience of the world; these struggles led him to embark on a search for truth that culminated in his reception into the Catholic Church in 1985. Beauty led him to truth: the Catholic Church’s sacramental view of the world, and her realistic awareness of the cross that all men must carry, impressed him as the only vision of reality that ultimately made sense.
Dr. Howard is an accomplished prose stylist with degrees in English from Wheaton College in Illinois, the University of Illinois, and New York University. He spent his professional life teaching in prep schools in England and New York, as well as at Gordon College in Massachusetts and St. John’s Seminary in Boston. Along the way, he found time to write a number of deeply felt and moving books that articulated his journey of faith and addressed issues of pressing concern to most serious Christians today. Among these are Evangelical Is Not Enough, On Being Catholic, Christ the Tiger, and If Your Mind Wanders at Mass. Now retired, Dr. Howard resides in New England. He is married and has two grown children.
