Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.

This biography of Robert Sayers Sheffey weaves the story of a unique--in the true meaning of the word--man, the details of whose life entitle him to the mythical position he holds even today among the people of a part of the South, where, so many years ago, he traveled the circuits of Virginia, West Virginia, and into the fringes of other states as an itinerant preacher. Born in 1820, raised in Virginia, and having spent a part of his early youth in the home of a wealthy Presbyterian uncle and aunt, there was little in his early background to explain Robert Sheffey's call to the Methodist ministry, his unusual conversion, and, against all odds, the eventual acceptance of his unorthodoxy by the hierarchy of his adopted church, and, ultimately, the adoration of an army of followers who came to believe him to be a Divine. Here are documented his extraordinary gifts of exhortation, the depths of his caring about every single soul in the widespread territory he rode--on a brutally rigorous, self-imposed schedule--as well as the unexplainable psyche and prophetic talents that truly earned him the title "Saint of the Wilderness." Mr. Carr's book tells, in detail, of this physically frail, yet incredibly strong man (whose life spanned eighty-two years) and the demons with which he had to wrestle, his personal deprivations and sorrows and triumphs, the beauty of his love for all living things, and the unshakability of his faith and prayer petitions. The Saint of the Wilderness is the authentic, thoroughly researched life of a figure still revered, still talked about throughout the South, and not rarely, in other parts of the world. But such a life example knows no bounds: such love and faith is universal in its appeal to the whole of mankind.

This biography of Robert Sayers Sheffey weaves the story of a unique-in the true meaning of the word-man, the details of whose life entitle him to the mythical position he holds even today among the people of a part of the South, where, so many years ago, he traveled the circuits of Virginia, West Virginia, and into the fringes of other states as an itinerant preacher. Born in 1820, raised in Virginia, and having spent a part of his early youth in the home of a wealthy Presbyterian uncle and aunt, there was little in his early background to explain Robert Sheffey's call to the Methodist ministry, his unusual conversion, and, against all odds, the eventual acceptance of his unorthodoxy by the hierarchy of his adopted church, and, ultimately, the adoration of an army of followers who came to believe him to be a Divine. Here are documented his extraordinary gifts of exhortation, the depths of his caring about every single soul in the widespread territory he rode-on a brutally rigorous, self-imposed schedule-as well as the unexplainable psyche and prophetic talents that truly earned him the title "Saint of the Wilderness." Mr. Carr's book tells, in detail, of this physically frail, yet incredibly strong man (whose life spanned eighty-two years) and the demons with which he had to wrestle, his personal deprivations and sorrows and triumphs, the beauty of his love for all living things, and the unshakability of his faith and prayer petitions. The Saint of the Wilderness is the authentic, thoroughly researched life of a figure still revered, still talked about throughout the South, and not rarely, in other parts of the world. But such a life example knows no bounds: such love and faith is universal in its appeal to the whole of mankind.

John A. O'Brien has crafted the terrifying, inspiring, and true tale of the struggles of the Jesuit missionaries seeking to bring Catholicism to the new world.