Praise for Fierce Convictions

A book everyone should read, a life everyone should know, and one that many should emulate.

—Eric Metaxas, best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Seven Men

I’m so glad I read this book. I knew nothing about Hannah More before being introduced to her by Karen Swallow Prior’s wonderful biography. Hannah More—a marvelous writer and a courageous opponent of the slave trade—is now one of my special saints!

—Dr. Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary

Karen Swallow Prior isn’t satisfied with arresting the intellect. She goes after the imagination and the affections as well with truth, beauty, and wisdom. This book will grip you to the point that you will turn the last page asking, “How does this change the way I live from now on?

—Russell D. Moore, President - Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission

Hannah More was an educational pioneer and a best-selling evangelical author of “cheap tracts” for England’s poor in the tumultuous years of the American and French Revolutions. As educator, writer, reformer, and public Christian she was much lauded, but also much lampooned, during her own lifetime. With careful research, balanced judgments, accessible prose, and unusual insight, Karen Swallow Prior’s biography shows clearly why Hannah More made such an important impact in her own age, and also why her life can speak in significant ways to readers today.

—Mark A. Noll, author of The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys and Francis A. McAnaney professor of history, University of Notre Dame

Karen Swallow Prior is an extraordinary thinker, writer, voice in the church today. Simply—I cannot miss anything she writes. This generation is in desperate need of lives like Hannah More’s. I can’t wait to see how her story changes the current landscape of the church and raises up many with fierce convictions in this generation

—Ann Voskamp, best-selling author of One Thousand Gifts

Here is that rarity of a book: scholarship of impeccable rigor that’s also a compulsive page-turner. Reading Karen Swallow Prior feels like a privilege.

—Leonard Sweet, best-selling author, professor, Drew University and George Fox University, and chief contributor to sermons.com

Hannah More was an extraordinary woman with extraordinary convictions … much like Karen Swallow Prior. This book is a feat in and of itself and I’m excited that lives of brave women can be told by the next generation of brave, young women. As an abolitionist, I find strength in knowing there are many that have gone before and many who will come after.

—Christine Caine, founder, The A21 Campaign and best-selling author of Undaunted

Professor Prior’s perspective, which combines literary and historical insights, gives a valuable window into the character of Hannah More, who is interesting, not just because she is so sparky but also because More’s interests were so many and she is so full of contradictions. It does us local ...