Publisher’s Preface
Publisher’s Preface
Abingdon Press is delighted to publish once again this E. Stanley Jones favorite, The Way. It is another of E. Stanley Jones’s best-selling books and has been translated into numerous languages since its original publication in 1946.
The manuscript for The Way was in development for many years. E. Stanley Jones talks about starting to write this book and taking great care of his notes during his travels. Over time he came to realize that The Way was not meant to be his next book after all. But eventually, and thankfully for us, the time was right. The Way is an adventure, the author says, an experiment in living.
The Way was released just after 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.
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. 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. And some references that were specific to the 1940s still have relevance for our time. 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.