This Given Life One Catholic Life in Context

In this literate autobiography, Bolton Anthony recounts his own life's journey amid the momentous changes that transformed the segregated South and the Catholic Church of his childhood. He discovers continuity in what seemed chance career choices - to teach at a black university in New Orleans the year Martin Luther King was shot; to step forward, 30 years later, to lead the centennial commemoration of an infamous incident of racial violence. He examines the paths that converge and diverge in his own journey of faith - a Church that threw open its doors to reform, then all too soon retreated; his discovery, during those same years, of a Catholic tradition richer and deeper than the cultural Catholicism of his childhood and youth. The book is a celebration of family, of the mentors who inspire us, of the friendships that abide. For the author, it is also a journey of self-discovery whose end, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, is to arrive where he started and know, as if for the first time, his own gifts as a teacher and a writer.