Evangelical Christians have long been interested in spiritual disciplines, especially daily Bible study and prayer. In 1978, Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline brought other practices such as meditation, fasting and confession to evangelical attention, and since then publishers have released a spate of spiritual discipline books by evangelical Protestants who like to read Catholic authors. Winebrenner continues this tradition, referencing Catholic writers such as Thomas Merton, François Fénelon and Henri Nouwen along with Protestants including Eugene Peterson, Oswald Chambers and Dallas Willard. Director of the Dallas Christian Writers Guild, she has an easy-to-follow workmanlike approach, laced with homey illustrations about horses and football and children leaving for college. To the frequently taught disciplines of study, prayer, worship, fellowship and service, she adds a dozen others, including humility, chastity, secrecy, silence and celebration. All disciplines, she repeatedly emphasizes, have one goal: a passionate romance with God. On nearly every page she writes rhapsodically about God's personal love, connecting it with whatever discipline she is presenting. For example, in meditation, "my mind becomes filled with awareness of God's tender love for me, and I am quickly at peace, quickly settled and almost instantly relieved of any desire to think of anything but God." As a basic introduction to various Christian disciplines as well as an inspirational paean to God's love, this book will appeal to evangelical women (and likely men) who might be put off by the scholarly approach of some of its predecessors. A study guide is included. (Jan.)

Intimate Faith (A Woman's Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines)

jan-winebrenner

Warner Books, Inc.

Steel in His Soul

Moody Publishers

"If hell is here on earth, it is located on an oddly shaped city block in downtown Hanoi, Vietnam," writes Sam Johnson, who lived in that hell for seven years. Col. Samuel R. Johnson, U.S. Air Force, was shot down in April, 1966, while flying his twenty-fifth mission over North Vietnam. Shortly after his capture and imprisonment in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, Colonel Johnson was labeled a diehard by his enemies. His creative and innovative resistance of prison authority earned him banishment to the high-security prison unit where, unknown to U.S. military intelligence, Ho Chi Minh kept the eleven prisoners believed to be a serious threat to his war efforts. For two years Johnson and the other ten endured leg irons, malnutrition, and appallingly primitive conditions while imprisoned in tiny cubicles built in the earthen-walled facility dug out of the center courtyard of North Vietnam's Ministry of Defense in downtown Hanoi. Captive Warriors is the story of Alcatraz, where courage and humor thrived amid the madness. It is the story of Colonel Johnson's seven-year battle for his life, limbs, and sanity. It is the story of the hundreds of captured warriors--American POWs--whose lives lay in the hands of angry and vengeful North Vietnamese captors. The book also chronicles America's trek into political confusion and chaos throughout the course of the Vietnam War. More than a story, Captive Warriors is a tribute to all the American prisoners of war who, without benefit of the conventional weapons of war, waged daily battles against an insidious enemy disdainful of the requirements of the Geneva Conventions and who, in the end, became the final pawn in the peace settlement that ended the longest war in American history.

Captive Warriors: A Vietnam POW's Story (Texas A & M University Military History Series 23) (Volume 23)

History

Sam Johnson

Military

Texas A&M University Press

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