Here is an invaluable collection of 10 essays, all written by American academic philosophers, which demonstrates, particularly to those who think religious people will always have to suppress their reasoning processes, that intelligent people outside the Church do indeed use their minds when contemplating the challenge and invitation to faith. As the foreword to Faith and Reason: Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism (Edited by Brian Besong and Jonathan Fuqua, Ignatius Press, 289pp, £15.99 /$19.95) states: “The Catholic philosopher maintains that although reason is the limit of the human intellect’s power, it is not the limit of what the human intellect may reasonably believe.” Edward Feser, associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena College, California, writes that “Christianity was so systematically doctrinal a religion” it made it “especially attractive to a philosopher”. A lapsed Catholic, he reasoned himself back to the Church. Significantly, he comments that, when he finally examined the teachings of Catholicism, he read the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s writings on sexual morality and “saw the logic of natural law arguments against contraception and was convinced by the historical arguments that Christianity had indeed condemned contraception from the beginning”. Sometimes one anecdote illuminates a long mental process, as when J Budziszewski, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and was raised a Baptist, relates that reading Dante’s Paradiso to his students and lecturing to them on St Thomas Aquinas, “Some days … it took all the control I could muster to conceal the fact that I felt like weeping for the sheer beauty of the appearance of truth, an appearance I bitterly told myself was an illusion.” Robert C Koons, a colleague of Budziszewski, had a moment similar to that of Newman when he confesses that reading Cyprian, one of the Church Fathers, was a “deeply disturbing experience … one from which I have never fully recovered … Contrary to my expectations, the early Fathers sounded much more Roman than porto-lutheran”. Brian Cutter, an assistant philosophy professor at Notre Dame, quotes from Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven and admits that “I came to feel that a life without worship was a half-human life.” This introduction has barely scratched the surface of this book. For any honest seeker after truth, these intellectual journeys, undertaken with unsparing honesty and courage (especially that of Candace Vogler, a professor at Chicago University), make a compelling case.