The book is Thomas Howard's Hallowed Be This House: Finding Signs of Heaven in Your Home (new edition; also available as in Electronic Book Format), reviewed on the "Musings of a Christian Humanist" blog by Robert Woods:
As with Erasmus, I affirm that The Imitation of Christ by
Thomas A'Kempis is the grandest of devotional reads. The devotional
books that litter the bookstores, especially the local Christian
bookstore are more shaped by the lowest
common denominator of trivial
therapeutic drivel, the "cutting edge" madness of the management class,
or silly self-help books that know nothing about the complexities of the
human self and never address the matter of how a self so open to self
deception can really help that same self. The insipid devotional books
reign supreme.
In this dismal situation there is a bright ray of devotional greatness that arrives. Actually, it is making a bit of a second coming. Originally published in 1976, Thomas Howard's Hallowed Be This House has been reprinted by Ignatius Press. My wife and I have been reading it (almost finished) and it has changed our sense of place. ...
The book is filled with insights from scripture, anthropology, history, literature, psychology, sociology, and theology. A truly cross-disciplinary devotional book exploring the intersection between heaven and home, embodiment and habitat, space and spirit. I'm confident that if asked, Thomas Howard would agree that this is a Christian Humanistic devotional.
I interviewed Dr. Howard last month about the book and some related topics. Here is one question and response:
CWR: How did the idea for Hallowed Be This House originally come about? Do you think there is an even greater need today for a sense of the hallowed and the sacred than there was when you first wrote the book in the 1970s?
Thomas Howard: I think the original idea for the book came to me gradually. It must have been the fruit of a lifetime of reading and teaching Western literature, where one finds, up until at least the Enlightenment, the assumption of an ordered, hierarchical, and blissful Universe. Even the pagans assume this. But in my young adulthood, I found myself moving from the very faithful and good Protestant Evangelicalism of my family into the Anglican Church, where at least the notions of hierarchy, sacrament, and liturgy are remembered. Also, of course, I became soaked in the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friend Charles Williams. In all of these writers, one finds the ordinary stuff of quotidian life treated as though that stuff bespeaks—what shall we say? Glory? Ultimacy? The Truth of things? Splendor? Yes—all of that. The ordinary is not ordinary. It trumpets joy, freedom, and virtue to us mortals if we will pay attention.
Is there a greater need today to see things this way than when I wrote the book in the 1970s? Yes. In the decade of the 1960s, when my wife and I were living in New York, which became the eye of the storm, Western Civilization as it has been known for millennia collapsed. The moral order was overthrown with great zest, and this overthrow is always, inevitably, the prelude to the collapse of any civilization. I myself would see signs of hope, however, in the papacies of John Paul II and of Benedict XVI, with, in the latter case, the promulgation of the Year of Faith. This is a clear call to the Church to reassert, very strongly, the real substance of the Catholic Faith, which is more, far more, than a matter of “it’s nice to be nice,” which perhaps has been the impression conveyed to the laity in common parish homiletics in the wake of what obviously concerns the Holy Father at the moment—namely the training of seminarians, for perhaps a century, in “the historical critical method” of reading Scripture.
Read the entire interview on the CWR site.




































































































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