James Martin, is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, and the author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage and other books. This collection of meditations on the seven last words of Jesus from the cross is based on Martin's homilies at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral on Good Friday 2015.

The author dedicates this deft portrait of Jesus' humanity to "all who have ever felt confused, abandoned, or alone." Martin proclaims ways in which Jesus understands the challenges of forgiveness, doubts about the afterlife, a parent's love, feelings of abandonment, physical pain, disappointment, and self-offering. He concludes with a gracious tribute to the Incarnation and its deep understandings of the call for all to be friends with Jesus.