For every day from Shrove Tuesday to Easter Day, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive reflections on it. A scholar of poetry and a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Lent.

Once a vibrant part of religious life for many Pennsylvania Germans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Fraktur manuscripts today are primarily studied for their decorative qualities. The Word in the Wilderness takes a different view, probing these documents for what they tell us about the lived religious experiences of the Protestant communities that made and used them and opening avenues for reinterpretation of this well-known, if little understood, set of cultural artifacts. The resplendent illuminated religious manuscripts commonly known as Fraktur have captivated collectors and scholars for generations. Yet fundamental questions about their cultural origins, purpose, and historical significance remain. Alexander Lawrence Ames addresses these by placing Fraktur manuscripts within a “Pietist paradigm,” grounded in an understanding of how their makers viewed “the Word,” or scripture. His analysis combines a sweeping overview of Protestant Christian religious movements in Europe and early America with close analysis of key Pennsylvania devotional manuscripts, revealing novel insights into the religious utility of calligraphy, manuscript illumination, and devotional reading as Protestant spiritual enterprises. Situating the manuscripts in the context of transatlantic religious history, early American spirituality, material culture studies, and the history of book and manuscript production, Ames challenges long-held approaches to Pennsylvania German studies and urges scholars to engage with these texts and with their makers and users on their own terms. Featuring dozens of illustrations, this lively, engaging book will appeal to Fraktur scholars and enthusiasts, historians of early America, and anyone interested in the material culture and spiritual practices of the German-speaking residents of Pennsylvania.

The gospel of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth has healed countless lives over the centuries, but the gospel itself has been wounded through neglect of one of its main components. The books of Luke and Acts reveal that the death and resurrection of Jesus are linked inextricably to the destruction and promised restoration of Jerusalem, the city that personifies the Jewish people as a whole. To highlight this expanded understanding of the gospel, Mark Kinzer and Russ Resnik unpack the Hebrew term for gospel, besorah, as a prophetic message of salvation for Israel and all nations. In Luke's besorah, the death and resurrection of the Messiah are a sign of the coming judgment and restoration of Jerusalem and the Jewish people--a restoration that brings with it the renewal of all creation. This prophetic dimension of the besorah is a key to healing the fractured gospel and restoring its power amidst the strife and tumult of the twenty-first century.