Deals with a brazen ex-football player who enters the ministry and, through his half-plagiarized sermons, his physical attractiveness, and his unerring instinct for promotion, becomes a successful evangelist and later the leader of a large Middle Western church.

In 1956, toward the end of Rev. John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. This is also the tale of wisdom forged during his solitary life and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

When a lightning bolt shatters a decorative cross in the yard of a church in a small town in Michigan, a carpenter shows up to repair it. But the carpenter is no ordinary man, as the church pastor, his odd family, and local medical staff treating his adoptive grandchild for leukemia find out in a series of miraculous events that change them dramatically.

Annie Zook, the daughter of an Amish preacher, finds herself caught between her world and the outside world while living with her shunned friend Esther and longing for her forbidden art and her relationship with Ben Martin.

After twelve years of wrestling with the conflicts of retirement, Father Tim Kavanagh realizes he doesn't need a steady job to prove himself. Then he's given one. As for what it proves, heaven only knows. It's life as usual in Mitford. A beloved town character lands a front-page obituary, but who was it, exactly, who died? And what about the former mayor, born the year Lindbergh landed in Paris, who is still running for office? All this, of course,...

Minister Paul Hudson, called to pastor a struggling church in California, becomes so caught up in building attendance and filling church coffers that he loses sight of his mission to save souls, alienating his wife and son, and eventually bringing about his own downfall.

Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa -- the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack -- and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and...

The tale of a father desperate to reconnect with his daughter and regain the love of his wife. But first he must discover that reconciliation and trust begin, not with words, but with the revelation of the heart.

"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about . . . angels. Heather survived a childhood that culminated...

Thelma and Wayne Owens run a bed and breakfast in Cape Refuge, Georgia. They minister to the seamen on the nearby docks and prisoners just out of nearby jails, holding services in an old warehouse and taking many of the "down-and-outers" into their home. They have two daughters: the dutiful Morgan who is married to Jonathan, a fisherman, and helps them out at the B & B, and Blair, the still-single town librarian, who would be beautiful if it weren't...