Frank Buchman: A Life

Frank Buchman was the initiator of the Oxford Group also known as Moral Re-Armament. This is the story of a man who set out to remake the world and it is only possible to understand Frank Buchman in the context of that aim. Everything he did in his adult life was a part of it, and scarcely anything he did could, in his eyes, be separated from it. That aim conditioned where and how he lived, how he approached people and situations, and what he did from hour to hour. Buchman was always - and still is - a controversial figure. In the thirties Archbishop Lang of Canterbury stated that he was being 'used to bring multitudes of human lives in all parts of the world under the transforming power of Christ', while Bishop Henson of Durham accused him of 'megalomaniacal self-confidence'. The author and Member of Parliament for Oxford University, A.P. Herbert, called him a 'canting cheat' in the House of Commons, and Tom Driberg, later to be Chairman of the Labour Party, attacked the Home Secretary for allowing a man who had never denounced Hitler to re-enter Britain in 1946. In 1961 Robert Schuman said that Buchman's death was an 'irreparable loss to the world". Such a variety of opinions calls for a more thorough investigation than has yet appeared. This is the first full-length biography of Buchman which attempts to present the man with the greatest degree of objectivity, and to analyse the fascination he had for people, from such varied backgrounds and countries.