Joe Wheeler
Joe Wheeler has been labeled many things: as Father Christmas because of his editing/compiling America’s longest-running Christmas of story series — Christmas in My Heart (now in its 18th season); as one of America’s leading story anthologists (56 story collections by twelve publishing houses); as the world’s foremost authority on life and times of the frontier writer Zane Grey (he is co-founder and executive director of the international Zane Grey’s West Society); as a biographer, having written full-length biographies of Abraham Lincoln and St. Nicholas and shorter biographies of Louisa May Alcott, Abbie Farwell Brown, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Gene Stratton Porter, Grace Richmond, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and Lew Wallace; and as a Renaissance Man because of his encyclopedic interest in everything (popular culture as well as the academic); and his master’s degree in the teaching of History, his master’s degree in English (thesis on Utopian and Dystopian literature), and his Vanderbilt doctorate in English (History of Ideas emphasis).
Because of all these variables, and stirring in his 71 books (and counting), this blog series promises to be unlike any other — and that’s why he titles the series, “UNCHARTED WATERS.”
“Lincoln grew immeasurably as he came to think of himself as an “instrument of God’s will.”
“When Lincoln was asked if God was on the Union’s side, Lincoln’s unvarying response was that what was really important was whether they were on God’s side.”
“Man’s glory lies not, Lincoln thought, in ‘his goodness,’ for this is often nonexistent. He derives glory, instead, from his being made in the image of the Living God.”