The Life of Adoniram Judson

This is the biography of a man who essentially invented American missionary work. Adoniram Judson arrived at Harvard a brilliant, restless skeptic and left it consumed by a faith that would define the rest of his life. The son of a New England clergyman, he abandoned the comfortable path laid out before him to bring Christianity to Burma, a land where no American had ever planted the gospel. He spent thirty-eight years there, translating the entire Bible into Burmese, enduring imprisonment, starvation, and the death of his first wife. This biography, written by his son Edward who grew up in that distant, strangest of foreign lands, draws on family letters, personal journals, and memories that could only come from someone who was there. It captures not just the facts of a remarkable life but the texture of a father's faith, his doubts, his failures, and his relentless, almost stubborn devotion to a people who came to love him. For anyone curious about the origins of global evangelical Christianity, or about the extraordinary Americans who once crossed oceans to change the world, this is an essential, deeply human portrait.