Contact: Audra Jennings, The B&B Media Group, 800-927-0517 ext. 104, ajennings@tbbmedia.com

DALLAS, June 9 /Christian Newswire/ -- Today, over two hundred years after John Newton struggled alongside William Wilberforce to bring an end to the African slave trade, three times as many people around the world are living as slaves. When the first abolition bill passed in 1807, four million people were enslaved; today the number is estimated at twelve million. In the new biography, Once Blind (Authentic), author Kay Marshall Strom skillfully employs the legacy of John Newton to call attention to 21st-century slavery throughout the world.

After years of research into the former slave ship captain's letters, treatises, journals, and church archives, Strom has penned a riveting biographical narrative of Newton, a broken and desperate man whose stirring hymn, "Amazing Grace," has testified to millions of his transformation from the worst of the worst to a ringing voice for God. His personal accounts of the slave trade and piercing cry for abolition, along with the work of his friend William Wilberforce, helped turn the heart of a nation against the African slave trade to bring it to an end. Readers are introduced to his troubled childhood, his forced service to the Royal Navy, and God's pursuit of Newton with relentless love and amazing grace. Newton once told Wilberforce, "There are two things I know in my life. I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior."

Strom is convinced her poignant account of John Newton's fight against slavery two centuries ago is a very relevant call to action for believers today. "Slavers today don't sail the high seas with chained captives packed into the holds of their ships like in the days of John Newton," Strom writes. "Yet when people are owned as property, bought and sold, physically punished for not working hard enough, locked up so they can't leave, and thrust into deplorable or dehumanizing work conditions, then, whatever they're called, they are slaves... Never have we needed John Newton's legacy more than today!"

"Bringing awareness to modern-day slavery is my passion," states Strom. "I have done extensive traveling and writing and have seen firsthand the individual faces of suffering in India, Sudan, and Nepal. We as Christians have stepped back from 'doing justice and loving mercy' like the Bible commands, when we should be in the forefront."

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