Book cover for Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Annie Dillard, Thomas Merton, C. S. Lewis, Henri Nouwen, John Donne, Meister Eckhart, Dorothy Day, T. S. Eliot, Edith Stein, Thomas Aquinas and Philip Yancey
2014 Released
344 Pages
5-7 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
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Plough Publishing HouseISBN 9780874869170

This collection, born of obvious passion and graced with superb writing, is a welcome even necessary addition to the glutted holiday bookshelves. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Though Christians the world over make yearly preparations for Lent, there's a conspicuous lack of good books for that other great spiritual season: Advent. All the same, this four-week period leading up to Christmas is making a comeback as growing numbers reject shopping-mall frenzy and examine the deeper meaning of the season.

Ecumenical in scope, these fifty devotions invite the reader to contemplate the great themes of Christmas and the significance that the coming of Jesus has for each of us - not only during Advent, but every day. Whether dipped into at leisure or used on a daily basis, Watch for the Light gives the phrase "holiday preparations" new depth and meaning.

Includes contributions by these and other writers:

  • C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, Thomas Merton, and Philip Yancey
  • Dorothy Day, Henri Nouwen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and Edith Stein
  • Martin Luther, Meister Eckhart, Eberhard Arnold, and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt
  • T. S. Eliot, John Donne, and Sylvia Plath
  • Karl Barth, Will Willimon, Jürgen Moltmann, and J. B. Phillips
  • Kathleen Norris, Brennan Manning, and Evelyn Underhill
  • Annie Dillard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • Romano Guardini, St. John Chrysostom, and Giovanni Papini
  • Jane Kenyon, Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, Isaac Penington, and Alfred Delp

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a renowned and beloved Christian minister, seminary professor, and theologian who was imprisoned and later executed by the Nazis for his resistance to Hitler. He was the author of the bestselling classic The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and Letters and Papers from Prison.

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Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.


More by Annie Dillard

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a fellow and tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954 when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.

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Henri Nouwen

Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996) was the author of With Open Hands, Reaching Out, The Wounded Healer, Making All Things New, and many other bestsellers. He was the senior pastor of L'Arche Daybreak in Toronto, Canada, a community where men and women with mental disabilities and their assistants create a home for one another.

More by Henri Nouwen

Dorothy Day

""Dorothy Day, is a modern Catholic saint in the tradition of St. Francis. Her book is an absorbingly well-written series of pictures of her work and that of those she has gathered around her connection with the Catholic Worker, its hospitality house and its community farm. I rejoice with the new hope for mankind because of the kind of work that she and her associates are doing.""- Norman Thomas

More by Dorothy Day

T. S. Eliot

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

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Edith Stein

Edith Stein (1891–1942) was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. She became an atheist as a teenager, but at the age of thirty encountered the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila, converted to Catholicism, and took vows as a Carmelite nun. Because of her Jewish ancestry she was executed at Auschwitz by the Nazis in August 1942. 

More by Edith Stein

Philip Yancey

Philip Yancey previously served as editor-at-large for Christianity Today magazine. He has written thirteen Gold Medallion Award-winning books and won two ECPA Book of the Year awards, for What's So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew. Four of his books have sold over one million copies. He lives with his wife in Colorado. Learn more at philipyancey.com.

More by Philip Yancey

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