Father Alfred Delp (1907-1945) became a Jesuit in 1926 in Germany. He was very interested in philosophy and wrote a critical study of Martin Heidegger. During World War II, he joined a secret anti-Nazi group that was doing the spade work for a new Christian social order after the war. When this organization was exposed in the summer of 1944, Delp was taken into custody and charged with treason. He wrote many of the pieces in this paperback while in prison.

American monk Thomas Merton was quite impressed with the Jesuit's courage under fire and the depth of his Christian faith. In the introduction to this volume, he notes that Delp's prison meditations are a "penetrating diagnosis of a devastated, gutted, faithless society in which man is rapidly losing his humanity because he has become practically incapable of belief. Man's only hope, in this wilderness which he has become, is to respond to his inner need for truth, with a struggle to recover his spiritual freedom."

Although the Gestapo desperately tried to tie Delp with a plot against Hitler's life, they could only prove his "defeatist" attitude. Having plenty of time to assess his situation, Delp concluded: "My offense is that I believed in Germany and her eventual emergence from this dark hour of error and distress, that I refused to accept that accumulation of arrogance, pride, and force that is the Nazi way of life, and that I did this as a Christian and a Jesuit." On February 2. 1945, he was hanged to death in the prison at Berlin-Plotzensee.

The material in this edition from the Modern Spiritual Masters Series includes extracts from Father Delp's diary, meditations on Advent and Christmas, several essays on the tasks of the future, and several on his preparations for death. He cherished spiritual freedom and the grace of God; they served him well in his prison ordeals and in his confrontation with the domination system that unsuccessfully tried to quash his faith.