Five hundred years ago, a monk named Martin Luther wrote ninety-five questions, hoping to start a discussion about sin and repentance at the University of Wittenberg in Germany. In a few months those questions had stirred the nation; a few years later, the continent. Today we know that those questions changed the course of both the Western church and world history. In this volume for children, Simonetta Carr tells the compelling story of this father of the Protestant Reformation, tracing his quest for peace with God, his lifelong heroic stand for God's truth, and his family life and numerous accomplishments. The Reformer's greatest accomplishment, she writes, "has been his uncompromising emphasis on the free promise of the gospel."

Matthew Henry (1662-1714) is highly-valued by contemporary preachers and Bible users. Here we get a closer look at the life of Matthew Henry by an author who has had a life-long interest in Matthew Henry and his writings. Matthew Henry was the son of a Puritan pastor who had been silenced by the government of the time. Nevertheless Philip Henry, a godly man reared his family on Christian principles and Matthew followed the Lord from an early age. Although it was difficult to find suitable ministerial training, Matthew Henry eventually studied for the ministry. With government opposition relaxing, he became a Presbyterian pastor in Chester in 1687 and later in London from 1712. It is astonishing to note the amount of preaching and writing that he accomplished despite suffering from ill-health and knowing intense sorrow in his family life.

Here are the lives of fourteen remarkable people having in common a personal spiritual experience which changed and moulded them. Biographies include: Tsar Alexander Pavlovich; Lieut 'Birdie' Bowers; Sir James Simpson; Alves Reis; Joshua Poole; Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough; John Newton; Jean Henri Dunant; Martin Luther; Bilney, Tyndale & Latimer; Alfred the Great; Lieut-General Sir William Dobbie.

The story of a monk, a minstrel, and the music that brought them together

In 1965 writer-activist-monk Thomas Merton fulfilled a twenty-four-year dream and went to live as a hermit beyond the walls of his Trappist monastery. Seven months later, after a secret romance with a woman half his age, he was in danger of losing it all. Yet on the very day that his abbot uncovered the affair, Merton found solace in an unlikely place--the songs of Bob Dylan, who, as fate would have it, was experiencing his own personal and creative crises during the summer of 1966.

In this striking parallel biography of two countercultural icons, Robert Hudson plumbs the depths of Dylan's surprising influence on Merton's life and writing, recounts each man's interactions with the woman who linked them together--Joan Baez--and shows how each transcended his immediate troubles and went on to new heights of spiritual and artistic genius. Readers will discover here a riveting story of creativity and crisis, burnout and redemption, in the tumultuous era of 1960s America.

Eight years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith--responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition--might look like.
Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives--and for our deaths--if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that some of us call God?

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Religion Books of 2013