Tag: Conversion
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Interview on Mother Angelica Live 1995
A few months after taking over Crisis Magazine in February, 1995, I was very fortunate to be invited down to Irondale, Alabama, to the EWTN studies, to appear on Mother Angelica Live. It was this appearance that really started the steady growth of the magazine while I was its publisher and editor. Mother Angelica was…
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A Baptist Minister Becomes Catholic
This is my appearance on “The Journey Home,” an EWTN program hosted by Marcus Grodi, a marvelous fellow, by the way. The description of my appearance on the network website was as follows: As a child, Deal attended a Presbyterian Church at his mother’s promptings. In high school, after being witnessed to by a Southern…
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Passion, Not Prejudice-Mel Gibson’s Christ
By Deal W. Hudson Mel Gibson’s Passion is finally in movie theaters. Now people can see for themselves what all the hubbub is about. Most, I believe, will leave the theater shaken to the core by the terrible beauty of Gibson’s masterpiece. The media-driven expectation of an anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jews will be swept…
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How the Beatles, My Great Aunt, and Debussy Changed My Life
By Deal W. Hudson It was the spring of 1970 when Paul McCartney announced he was leaving the Beatles. I had already grown discontent with pop music, the frenetic discord of Jimmy Hendrix touched no part of a young man brought up on Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, and Broadway show…
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The Day a Red Bird Sang St. Thomas Aquinas
I was coming to the end of my first year as a college professor at Mercer University Atlanta. I was still a Southern Baptist though I had been wrestling with that affiliation since being introduced to St. Augustine at Princeton Theological Seminary. One of the greatest Protestant theologians, Soren Kierkegaard, had provided the base motif…
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Robert Novak–The Catholic Vote: Does It Swing?
Note: Robert (Bob) Novak was America’s premiere political reporter for decades until he died at age 78 in 2007. His work, starting at the Chicago Sun-Times and continuing through the Wall Street Journal, CNN’s “Crossfire,” and Fox News, is well-chronicled. In 1998, the year of this article, Novak was received into the Catholic Church by…
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Sigrid Undset: One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church
Editor’s note: The Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) is best known for her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter published between 1920 and 1922. Undset would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924 while her many novels, memoirs, hagiographies, and miscellaneous works would make her a major figure in world literature. The same year she was honored with…
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Reading Myself Into the Church
Deal W. Hudson Reading, said Saint Josemaría Escrivá, has made many a saint. In my own case it has merely made a convert, but has led me more deeply into the mystery that is the Church. Thomas Merton, we recall from his autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain, was started on his road to the Church by…
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Why I Rejected “Spirituality”
Deal W. Hudson I was newly graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, a licensed Southern Baptist ministry now at Emory University studying for a Ph.D in Theology and Literature. Prof. Author Evans, one of my teachers, an expert at French and European literature, had invited me to take tea with him in the back yard of…
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The Prince of Darkness Heads Towards the Light
Deal Hudson Published August 20, 2009 “My obituary will now begin with the Valerie Plame story,” Bob Novak said with a wry smile. We were having breakfast at the Army-Navy Club in Washington, D.C., a year after the media furor began over his column identifying Plame as a CIA operative. Novak, of course, was right:…