Cathlit2019

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

What happens when an atheist college professor at spiritual ground zero asks herself: "What if God is real?" In this memoir of her conversion, Holly Ordway turns her analytical mind toward the path that leads from darkness to light-from death to life. Simultaneously encouraging and bracing, she offers a bold testimony to the ongoing power of the Gospel-a Gospel that can humble and transform even self-assured, accomplished, and secular-minded young professionals like herself.

This extraordinarily sensitive and insightful portrait of religious life centers on Philippa Talbot, a highly successful professional woman who leaves her life among the London elite to join a cloistered Benedictine community.