Aimed at an American market, and sponsored by the Swedish American Augustana Heritage Foundation, this translation of Jonson's Swedish edition, minus footnotes alas, marking the centenary of Söderblom's consecration as Sweden's youngest archbishop (aged thirty-eight) on 8 November 1914, is a very readable and touching rehabilitation written for a general audience. In doing so, Jonson however poses the major biographical problem of assessing Söderblom's scholarship and ministry, in his words ‘called to serve’ and to spread ‘a genuine sense of communion … growing in Christianity’ (p. 389). In pursuance, Söderblom packed in a stupendous amount of work during sixteen years and eight months spanning the 1914–18 war, post-war Swedish deprivation fuelling militant socialism and secularism, the Russian Revolution with its neighbouring aftermath, civil war conditions in republican Finland after December 1917, and in the Baltic states before similar republican constitutions in 1922. Söderblom's archive in Uppsala University library holds forty-three metres of boxes, 38,000 letters, 130 notebooks, 2,800 manuscripts, and is complemented by his 1931 bibliography listing 669 titles (p. 427). And yet, with the passing away of his generation marked by the death in 1966 of Anna his devoted wife and executor, Söderblom's huge ecumenical achievements, summarised in the 1925 Stockholm ‘Life and Work’ conference, disappeared almost without trace in Sweden as it followed the post-1945 Scandinavian social welfare model. Even Adrian Hastings, in chapter xviii, ‘Ecumenical advances’, of his History of English Christianity 1920–2000 (repr. 2001), leaves out Söderblom, the friend of English ecumenists whom he does mention such as Oldham, Paton, Bell and Temple, or bishops Herbert Hensley Henson and Frank Woods who participated in post-1918 Swedish episcopal consecrations. Moreover, the wealth of archival material holds little on family and personal relationships, since Anna, protective of their twelve children, expressly forbade research into family papers. Today, the short final chapter, postscript and bibliography of Söderblom's books and articles in the late Eric Sharpe's Nathan Söderblom and the study of religion (1990), provides a valuable introduction perhaps for a Söderblom biography as English-speaking readers might like it, warts and all. Yet Jonson allows a reader to guess much about Söderblom's psyche and health. Chapter xxiii, ‘Luther and Lutheranism’, is absorbing on his fascination with Luther's happy and melancholic sides: viz. his essays, Humor och melankoli och andra Lutherstudier (1919). A reader can imagine the fallout on his children resulting from constant public service which demanded Anna's absence from home. Lucie, born in 1902, wrote about insecurity as ‘her strongest and earliest memory’. She felt abandoned when her parents were away, and when they were at home the atmosphere swung from happy activities to tones of disharmony. Anna's health was often delicate and Nathan could be ‘low in spirits’ (p. 118). The sequence in these thirty-four chapters is patchy, and there are mistakes. Berlin cathedral choir visited Uppsala in September 1918, not 1917 (p. 237), and Wilhelm Kempff, who played the organ at Söderblom's funeral, was a pianist not a violinist (p. 444). Kempff's elder brother, Georg, was a priest and organist at Uppsala cathedral, 1923–7, later director of music at Erlangen University 1933–59, and there a sponsor of Lutheran liturgical renewal with Paul Althaus: a charming appreciation is to be found in Wolfgang Trillhaas's theological memoirs, Aus meinem Leben (1976). The agnostic and later convert to Rome, Arnold Lunn, was the Alpine skiing pioneer (1908), not his Methodist father, Henry Lunn (p. 336). Henry, a prewar ecumenist and organiser of affordable Anglican tourism, hosted fifty clergy and laity in his Bernese Hôtel des Alpes in Lauterbrunnen in the year before the 1925 Stockholm conference – a tribute to Söderblom's fundraising ability. Söderblom's public Gifford Lectures, The living God: basal forms of personal religion (1933, repr. 1939), delivered in Edinburgh in May 1931, two months before his death, might still assist today's reader in a better comparative understanding of different religions and religious experience in our unsettled times.