“Whatever I Have Learned...I Have Learned From The Masters Of The Craft.”

Catholic Answers...Catholic Answers Live...Catholic.com...Catholicism and Fundamentalism...And so much more.

More than anyone else, Karl Keating is responsible for bringing Catholic Apologetics to a world hungry for truth.

Here's a glimpse at how it all started....

I was twelve when my maternal grandmother came to visit, the second-longest trip of her life. We moved to Southern California when I was six, so my childhood memories of her are few, but I have a photograph from her only visit to us.

When she visited, Grandma was given my bedroom. I was relegated to a cot in my parents’ room. I remember lying there, the sun’s warmth coming through diaphanous curtains. I delighted in the book I read, The Borrowers by Mary Norton. It had been published a decade before and was about tiny people who lived beneath the floorboards of a British house. They furnished their lodgings by “borrowing” things: a thimble for a table, a pocket watch for a wall clock, pins and needles for all sorts of uses.

I can’t recollect now what delighted me about the book. Perhaps it was the Britishisms more than the story itself. F. Scott Fitzgerald had said “the rich are different from you and me.” The same might be said about American readers and English writers. I appreciated and liked the differentness from early on.

That may have had a part to play in my choosing the five books which are the chief objects of discussion in this book. Their authors happen to have been English—except for Frank Sheed, who was born in Australia but did

his chief apologetical work in England, so in these pages he will be considered an honorary Englishman.

At one time I thought of pursuing a degree program focused on John Henry Newman, one of the five, but never did. In anticipation of it I collected nearly all of his writings and many about him. Later I did some work toward a program focused on another English author whose complete works I have, Samuel Johnson. I have two large bookcases devoted to him, his writings, and his era.

My other complete or almost-complete collections are of the works of Ronald Knox, Frank Sheed, and Arnold Lunn. So, all Englishmen (actual or honorary), all masters of the English language, all dedicated Christians. This emphasis on English writers came not in my adolescence but later, but perhaps an early impetus was the pleasure I took in the very English way that The Borrowers was written.

I had obtained an advanced degree in theology but, even while pursuing it, realized that most of what I would need for apologetics would have to be supplied privately. I would have to be self-taught, there being no formal, academic way to learn the craft. Not seeing what I needed in the present, I turned to the past, to the apologists of a

nother era. I found them in books that gave me knowledge, confidence, and pleasure. I learned from them how to learn the Faith and how to understand it, how to defend the Faith and how to convey it.

Booked For Life is about those books and about their effect on me as I backed into apologetics. Whatever I have learned, I have learned from masters of the craft. I claim no novel insights, no fresh approaches. My goal has been emulation, originality being beyond my powers. I have been a Borrower, taking things from giants and repurposing what I have taken as needed. If this book enkindles in others the delight I found in these authors, my appropriation of their arguments and methods may find pardon for me here below and, perhaps, conviviality with them hereafter.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, and want to find out more, pre-order your copy of Booked For Life today! Enter Promo Code WINTER at checkout to save 20%