Opening with the revived Catholic Order of Preachers, continental Protestants such as Abraham Kuyper, and the self-consciously modern preaching of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Old moves on to consider Victorian figures such as John Henry Newman and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He carefully lays out the tensions between Old and New School Calvinism as well as the beginnings of black preaching and the great American tradition of Charles Finney, Dwight L. Moody, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and many more. In the twentieth century Old's focus falls on the crises of the two world wars, especially the courageous ministries of German, Dutch, and Hungarian preachers during the Third Reich.