Of Intense Brightness: The Spirituality of Uncommon Christian James Brainerd Taylor

"Be uncommon Christians...that is, eminently holy, self-denying, cross-bearing, Bible, everyday Christians." So James Brainerd Taylor (1801-1829) encouraged others to be, and so he strived to be himself. Of Intense Brightness reveals aspects of Taylor's uncommon Christianity by allowing the Princeton and Yale-educated evangelist to speak for himself. By means of forty-five selected and edited letters and journal entries of Taylor's, readers will obtain a unique glimpse into the inner workings of an evangelical Protestant spirituality that was, according to nineteenth-century Princeton Seminary professor Samuel Miller, "so uniform, that we had only, as it were, one face, and that of intense brightness to behold."

I. Francis Kyle III is a youth and college campus minister in Port Angeles, Washington. A graduate of Canada's Prairie Bible College and Toronto Baptist Seminary (M.Div., Th.M.) and a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, he is a Doctor of Ministry student at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. Kyle is the author of An Uncommon Christian: James Brainerd Taylor, Forgotten Evangelist in America's Second Great Awakening (University Press of America, 2007).