Allen Guelzo, PhD, the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton University

In Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (2nd edition, 2022), Guelzo explores the role of ideas in Lincoln’s life, treating him as a serious thinker deeply involved in the nineteenth-century debates over politics, religion and culture. Through masterful and original scholarly work, Guelzo relates the outward events of Lincoln’s life to his inner spiritual struggles and sets them both against the intellectual backdrop of his age. The sixteenth president emerges as a creative yet profoundly paradoxical man—possessed of deep moral and religious character yet without adherence to organized religion.