Books by Thomas Howard

This book is a reprint with revisions of one of Thomas Howard's earliest and most popular books. It is somewhat autobiographical, revealing the thoughts of a young man who has been seized by the love of Christ and, at first, sees dogmas and institutions as obscuring the terrible truth of God's love in Christ. But even at that earlier period, Howard showed his awareness that without those institutions there would be no way of encountering Christ the tiger.Howard is able to bring out the true vitality of what this faith is and should be, the radical nature of the Christian faith. This book powerfully presents who Christ is and what faith in him means.from 'Christ the Tiger':In the figure of Jesus we saw Immanuel, that is, God, that is, Love. It was a figure who, appearing so inauspiciously among us, broke up our secularist and our religious categories and beckoned us and judged us and damned us and saved us and exhibited to us a kind of life that participates in the indestructible. And it was a figure who announced the validity of our eternal effort to discover significance and beauty beyond inanition and horror by announcing to us the unthinkable: redemption.

The fanciful novels of Charles Williams have long fascinated a rather elite reading public - T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and C.S. Lewis, for example, were among his great admirers. But those books - which include ''The Place of the Lion'', ''Descent into Hell'', and ''All Hallows'' Eve'' - are also dense and perplexing, and even the writer''s fondest devotees have found the meanings of his fiction elusive. Here at last is a clear and informed guide to the complexities and rich rewards of Charles Williams'' novels.As Thomas Howard notes, Williams'' tales might best be described as metaphysical thrillers, in which Williams used occult machinery in much the same way that Conrad used exotic locales and Joyce used the subconscious: to vivify human experience and awaken readers to its range and possibilities. One tale might feature a chase for the Holy Grail across Hertfordshire fields, while in another the picture may switch with no apology at all from a policeman at a crossroad to the Byzantine Emperor. As Howard lucidly demonstrates, the controlling factor behind Williams'' work is an essentially Christian worldview in which heaven and hell seem to lurk under every bush and the constant theme is order versus disintegration.Concentrating on Williams'' novels, Howard brilliantly illuminates the major concerns that informed all of Williams'' thinking. Howard also considers Williams'' work in the context of modern fictional practice and assesses its place in the tradition of the English language novel.