Publisher’s Preface
Publisher’s Preface
Abingdon Press is delighted to bring back into print Abundant Living. It has been one of E. Stanley Jones’s best-selling books, has been translated into numerous languages, and has made a difference in the lives of more than one million people.
Originally published in 1942, Abundant Living was released in the middle of World War II. At that time, E. Stanley Jones was living in the United States and bringing the Christian Ashram movement (with Jesus Christ as the teacher) from India to the U.S. and Canada. The book’s message that body, mind, and spirit must each be cared for in order to live a full life seems remarkably contemporary.
For this edition, the publisher has made some minor revisions but has also made every effort to retain E. Stanley Jones’s voice for today’s readers. The updates include spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and some language usage and references that would distract or confuse the reader. But there have been very few changes to content or style. Some references that were specific to the 1940s still have relevance for our time (e.g., the material on tobacco in week 20). References to humanity, no longer expressed as men and mankind, have been updated. Some references to God have been recast to avoid masculine pronouns. In the prayers, thee, thou, and thine have been changed to you, your, and yours. The term African American is used in this edition. A major effort to provide source citations where none existed was often but not always successful.
The publisher acknowledges with gratitude the efforts of Dean Merrill to keep the works of E. Stanley Jones available to readers in recent years.