The new book on Frank Buchman, The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman, has just been published by Pennsylvania State University Press. It is written by Philip Boobbyer, a history lecturer at the University of Kent in the UK, who is known to many in Initiatives of Change. The book focuses on Buchman’s ideas and spirituality, and has separate chapters on the origins of Buchman’s thinking, guidance, personal work, theological questions, strategy and organization, and politics and ideology.

The entry about the book in the Penn State catalogue reads as follows:

The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman is an in-depth look at the life, spirituality, and ideology of one of the most original figures in twentieth-century religion. Frank Buchman (1878–1961), the Pennsylvania-born initiator of the movement known as the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, was a Lutheran pastor who first had influence as a college evangelist and missionary with the YMCA. His thinking then evolved during the 1930s, the Second World War, and the early Cold War as he tried to develop a world philosophy that could offer an answer to war and materialism. His impact was particularly felt in the areas of conflict resolution between nations and interfaith dialogue, and Alcoholics Anonymous also owed much to his methods. Philip Boobbyer’s book is the first scholarly overview of Buchman’s ideas and is an important addition to the growing corpus of academic literature on his worldwide outreach. Boobbyer shows how his work reflected broader processes in twentieth-century religion and politics and can be seen as a spiritual response to an emerging global society.