Using the Collects (opening prayers) for each Sunday and major feast day of the church year (including Christmas, Epiphany, and the days of Holy Week and Easter Week), the author offers a brief (one-page), anecdotal meditation on the relationship of the prayer's and season's theme to the realities of life. Beginning with the First Sunday of Advent, Richard Schmidt takes the reader on a journey through the church year as he reflects on the mystery and challenge of our human pilgrimage.

This wonderful compendium of religious biographies offers a look inside the hearts and minds of significant shapers of Anglican spirituality over the past five centuries -- Thomas Cranmer, John Donne, George Herbert, John Wesley, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, and many more.

Covering twenty-nine of the most influential Anglican figures from the sixteenth century to the present, Richard H. Schmidt deftly chronicles their lives and work while capturing at the same time the deep personal faith that they have managed to communicate so powerfully to the rest of the world.

These icons of the Christian faith include not only bishops and scholars but also housewives, poets, novelists, and teachers. Each chapter contains a brief biographical sketch of its subject, a selection of short, representative quotations from his or her writings, and several questions for reflection and discussion.

Written in a personable style that brings readers into direct contact with some of the church's most admired witnesses, "Glorious Companions" will be valued both as a collection of insightful biographical information and as a lasting source of inspiration.

Foreword by Phyllis Tickle A fresh, readable introduction to Christian spirituality, God Seekers brings to life thirty-three spiritual masters from throughout Christian history. Through capsule biographies, selected quotations, and questions for reflection, Richard Schmidt presents and explores diverse ways of relating to God. Each chapter personalizes a major stream or movement of Christian spirituality by focusing on a particular key figure. -While God Seekers may be read with delight or for information . . . it is impossible to engage it for long without being seized as well by the grandeur of the panorama it lays out before us. Here, in living people, in living saints, is the history of the church, the body of Christ as we and our kind have shaped it and are shaping it.--- Phyllis Tickle (from the foreword)