“Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see!”

The hymn is heard around the world; bagpipers are heard even in the Highlands pouring out the haunting melody.  But how many know that the words for this well-known song came from the heart-depths of a formerly rough and hardened slave trader?  His ship would sit for months in the harbors of African trading centers until enough captives were brought to him by local brokers in humanity to make up a trans-Atlantic shipload of suffering human cargo (Journal of a Slave Trader, by John Newton.)

It was a raging storm and Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation […]