On an April evening over 400 years ago a simple monk faced the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. His words, heard by only a roomful of people, have echoed through the centuries: My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant any things for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. Because he took his stand, Martin Luther shattered the structure of medieval Catholicism and initiated Protestantism. This...

It's the mid-1980s. Julia Scheeres and her adopted brother David are sixteen years old and have just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees and trailer parks--and a racism neither of them is prepared for. While Julia is white, her close relationship with David, who is black, makes them both outcasts. At home, a distant mother--more involved with her church's missionaries than with her own children--and a violent father only compound...