This memorial is long overdue as we fast approach the 4th year memorial this coming fall of the late Professor Thomas Howard. I recalled him recently as I read an article he wrote about sanctifying your home as a holy place. The article referenced a whole book he wrote on the subject of sanctifying our ordinary and humdrum habitations. As I reveled in his perky writing style, it struck me again how much he reminds me of one of my other great spiritual fathers, C.S. Lewis. Then I remembered how many times in my life I was blessed to enjoy the company of this would be American Oxford Don.

The first time I met Professor Howard was at a leadership camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan run by Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship. Cedar Campus is a camp and retreat center dedicated to ministering to college students (it is now under a different ministry but still dedicated to the mission of helping guests find God). I was there the summer of 1993 when Tom Howard came to visit. I had never met this brother of the famous missionary Elisabeth Eliot, but I was told that he was becoming equally famous for his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1985. He was so warmly received by the students when he performed his customary tradition of reading aloud to them from Winnie the Pooh.

I next met Tom when I first moved to Boston in the mid 90s. I was newly graduated from college and missing the fellowship of my peers after I moved there from the midwest to teach at an Orthodox Christian private school. Somehow through my contacts with other students in Inter Varsity, I found out about a monthly program he was running out of his house in Beverly, MA. St. Socrates Society was a forum he had gathered there to investigate deep, important contemporary issues using the age old Socratic method of dialogue. Though the room was chock full of Christians, I remember Tom apologizing that, “We do not have a bona fide atheist to balance out our Christian prejudice.”

Finally, I remember going to a bar several years ago to hear Professor Howard give a talk on one of my favorite books by C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. It was part of one of the best series on faith and popular culture called Theology on Tap. In Boston, it is hosted by Church of the Advent in Beacon Hill. His droll sense of humor, sharp wit, and extremely charitable words for some of his most severe critics brought me back again to that great pipe-smoking, tea-drinking author of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Eternal rest grant unto thy servant Thomas, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. And may his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.