In 1998, novelist Frank Schaeffer's eighteen-year-old son John joined the Marines straight out of prep school. Their ensuing journey, recounted in the bestselling Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, struck a fervent chord amongst the many Americans with a family member in the military. In Faith of Our Sons, Frank Schaeffer picks up his family's ongoing story as Corporal John Schaeffer is deployed to the Middle East on the day Gulf War II begins. Schaeffer's moving and timely account of the universal experience of losing a child— either temporarily or permanently—to war and his attendant emotions (from pride to panic to rage and back again) is punctuated throughout by the voices of the many others in Frank's situation, thousands of parents and children, who continue to pour their hearts out to the Schaeffers in countless letters since the publication of Keeping Faith—from those waiting anxiously for loved ones to come home to those who know they never will. No other book addresses the more intimate, but in some ways just as difficult and heroic side of the wartime experience: that of those waiting at home, praying for the safety of their loved ones.
New York Times best selling author of more than a dozen books Frank Schaeffer is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, an acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director and producer of four low budget Hollywood features Frank has described as "pretty terrible," and a best selling author of both fiction and nonfiction. Frank's three semi-biographical novels about growing up in a fundamentalist mission: "Portofino," "Zermatt" and "Saving Grandma" have a worldwide following and have been translated into nine languages. Jane Smiley writing in the Washington Post (7/10/11) says this of Frank's memoirs "Crazy For God" and "Sex, Mom and God": "[Schaeffer's] memoirs have a way of winning a reader's friendship...Schaeffer is a good memoirist, smart and often laugh-out-loud funny...Frank seems to have been born irreverent, but his memoirs have a serious purpose, and that is to expose the insanity and the corruption of what has become a powerful and frightening force in American politics... Frank has been straightforward and entertaining in his campaign to right the political wrongs he regrets committing in the 1970s and '80s...As someone who has made redemption his work, he has, in fact, shown amazing grace."
