Turning: Reflections on the Experience of Conversion

Turning is a personal account of the author's journey to God that eloquently demonstrates how deep and complex the process of conversion can be--and how its beauty and power can be a source of inspiration to us all. This book is unlike most others of its kind in that its focus is intellectual as well as emotional.

Emilie Griffin, an accomplished advertising executive, has written a lucid series of reflections on the process of her conversion to Catholicism through the experiences of other "pilgrims" who have encouraged and challenged her. Thus the stories of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, and Avery Dulles wove their way into her own story, and in them all she began to see a pattern emerge. She takes the reader through the battle of intellect and will, the first stirrings of desire, through the struggles of mind and heart, to the ultimate act of surrender to the will of God. In addition, she takes up the important question of continuing conversion as the normal process of the Christian life.

A work of utter candor and simplicity, Turning is a twentieth-century account of the experience of conversion whose insights and applications will be universally welcomed.

Emilie Dietrich Griffin, a native of New Orleans, lived in New York and worked in the advertising field there for many years, most recently as a Vice-President of Compton. The first director of a special program within the Council of Better Business Bureaus for advertising directed to children, she has contributed a chapter to Children and the Faces of Television, Academic Press. She now lives in New Orleans and has written lately for America, New Catholic World, Publishers Weekly, Cross Currents, and the Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society.