Here they all are, Lincoln and Davis, Lee and Grant, Jackson, Sherman, and Forrest, and Frederick Douglass, and Mary Todd, and many more besides, all in the situations and crucibles that brought them and the whole nation through them into clearer definition, not so much made to seem biblical in proportion, but simply recognized as so. And here they all are too, Catton, McPherson, and Foote, and Joshua Wolf Shenk, Ibram X. Kendi, and Sara Bakewell, all interlaced with Shakespeare, and Homer, and the Hebrew prophets, with Rumi, and Whitman, and with Martin Luther King Jr., all in the same way the living spirit seizes upon and reanimates what greatness it discerns. Borrowing from the past to bolster the present, The Book of Abraham is fundamentally a prayer for the future of our world, and a reinvestment of faith in a distinctively American purpose and ideal.