Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South

"Here is a real story of real people and real faith. The story of friendship between Chris Rice and my son Spencer and their work of racial reconciliation and healing represents the heart of the Christian witness. My prayer is that the 'seeds' of this story of struggle and hope they planted will spread and bloom and grow in the lives of many people." —John Perkins, chairman, Christian Community Development Association and author, Let Justice Roll Down

"Grace is the most potent counter force at work in our violent species, and our only hope. Chris Rice gives a very personal account, at once inspiring and disturbing, of its transforming power." — Philip Yancey, author, What's So Amazing About Grace?

"Chris Rice has a keen eye for detail and a gift for setting a scene. This remarkable, inspiring story he tells reads like a good novel. It is a story of powerful Christian faith, intense personal commitment, and maddening human frailty. But more than anything else, and though it ends in tragedy, this is a story of hope: My encounter with Grace Matters has left me daring to hope that, even at this late date, we Christians might yet live out the true meaning of our radical creed in regard to relations between blacks and whites in the United States." —Glenn C. Loury, director, Institute on Race and Social Division, Boston University

"In a rare and deeply significant way, Chris Rice honestly probes the difficult but essential journey toward genuine racial reconciliation. It is confessional, candid, and even painful as the author bares his soul and his struggles.... This is a book with a fundamental and hopeful message-that grace can become a way of life." —Jim Wallis, editor, Sojourners and convener, Call to Renewal

"Grace Matters is an extraordinary love story that is improbable as it was difficult. That a black man and a white man might be joined in a common love of God in Mississippi defies the imagination. But Chris Rice has helped us see that friendship—indeed a difficult friendship—is possible just to the extent a community existed in which truth mattered. Hopefully this book will be read and read widely, not simply to inform us about 'race relations' but because the story told here is one of hope and perseverance that hopefully will make more friendships possible." —Stanley Hauerwas, author of A Community of Character and named by Time magazine as America's Best Theologian