John Wesley Preaches in Times Square

John Wesley died in 1791. He had ridden a quarter of a million miles, preached more than forty thousand times, and left behind two silver teaspoons, a well-worn coat, and a church.

In this book he arrives in New York City. He walks it for three days — a coffee shop near midnight where a young man asks a machine what he is, a fourth-floor studio in Queens, a megachurch parking garage, the island where the city buries its unclaimed dead. On the fourth day he stands on a wooden crate at 42nd and Broadway and begins to preach.

Twelve sermons. He never preached a single one of them.

They are built from his actual sermons, journals, and letters, and set in front of the questions Americans are asking now. If the machine writes better than you, then what is a person? What can unearned love mean in a country that prices people by output? Why do people die alone in the most connected society in history? What happens to a church when it gets rich? Where is your time going, and who is taking it?

Every chapter ends with a section called Sources — a plain list of which of Wesley's own writings each argument rests on. It is the book's brake pedal, not its decoration. Wesley was hard on the comfortable and gentle with the crushed, and this book holds him to it.

Twelve chapters make twelve weeks. A guide for groups is in the back.