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The Everlasting Man

Considered by many to be Chesterton’s greatest masterpiece of all his writings, this is his whole view of world history as informed by the Incarnation. Beginning with the origin of man and the various religious attitudes throughout history, Chesterton shows how the fulfillment of all of man's desires takes place in the person of Christ and in Christ's Church.

Chesterton propounds the thesis that “those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact.” And with all the brilliance and devastating irony, so characteristic of his best writing, Chesterton gleefully and tempestuously tears to shreds that "very stale formula" and triumphantly proclaims in vivid language the glory and unanswerable logic of that very striking fact. Here is the genius of Chesterton at its delightful best.

The Wedding of Magdeburg

The Wedding of Magdeburg is no ordinary wedding. Germany, 1631: a world turned upside down by the Reformation. In the Free Imperial City of Magdeburg, one young bride is jilted on the eve of her nuptials, but as she waits for her groom to return, an even darker cloud looms: the Holy Roman Empire stands at the gates, ready to take the Protestant city as its own political “bride”. Will Magdeburg accept the proposal for the sake of peace, or will she rebel—and risk losing the battle altogether?

This masterpiece by Nobel Prize nominee Gertrud von le Fort, elegantly translated by Chase Faucheux, has never before appeared in English. At once a love story, a political thriller, and a historical study of war in the seventeenth century, it follows the Sack of Magdeburg, the tragic battle now considered one of the greatest massacres of the Thirty Years’ War.

Le Fort, acclaimed author of The Song at the Scaffold, takes a magnifying glass to the line that runs through every human heart—whether Protestant or Catholic, winning or losing, conquered or conquering. How do we find hope in the midst of destruction? How do we find freedom in total surrender?

With wisdom, riveting storytelling, and incredible psychological subtlety, The Wedding of Magdeburg tabulates the spiritual cost of war and shows how grace can dramatically imbue even the darkest moments of history.