Return to Rome

November 10, 2008
In May 2007, Beckwith, the president of the Evangelical Theology Society (ETS), stepped down as president of the society and resigned his membership. Eight days earlier, Beckwith had embraced the Catholicism of his childhood and youth and had been publicly received back into the Catholic Church. In this thinly written, often plodding book, Beckwith lukewarmly chronicles his journey back to Catholicism, from his early days of reading philosophy and his academic study with Protestant Christian apologists such as Norman Geisler and John Warwick Montgomery to his graduate work at Fordham and the encouragement of various family members to embrace Catholicism once again. In the end, Beckwith takes the best from both worlds, claiming that he is an evangelical insofar as he believes in the Gospel (evangel
) and a Catholic insofar as he believes that the church is universal. Since Beckwith’s book resembles a conversation among those in the know about the principles and struggles within ETS and Catholicism, it would have been more useful as a journal article. The book has little meaning for anyone outside this select circle struggling with a move from Protestantism to Catholicism.