Simple Gifts: Great Hymns: One Man's Search for Grace

Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Prizes to honor works by small presses, has produced an inspirational book that's gutsy and appropriately small. This is a smart, tough guy who once told a friend in a bar that he was fed up with preachers who describe God as a hair-trigger Sadist. This God doesn't make sense. It's "Life Everlasting" vs. "Eternal Damnation," he muses. Then, Henderson asks his buddy in the bar, "Is this God a moron?" Yet, somehow Henderson's odyssey takes him from that coarse skepticism to an appreciation of faith and hymns that prompts him to write: "Oh! When it hits! When a great old hymn reaches way down inside where you live: then the problem is not shall I sing, but can I sing at all. I choke up and stumble over words and notes. Nothing can mean so much as a classic hymn. Such hymns go to a source in us beyond our control and leave us overwhelmed with joy and recognition." Hey, I want to go sing hymns in Bill Henderson's church!

touching personal encounter with hymns as related to writer's personal experience. Had gumption to take on old chestnuts such as "Just As I Am" and Graham evangelism. Threw some new light on traditional hymns. Easy read I didn't put down.