" Amazing Grace " is a Christian hymn with words written by the English poet and clergyman John Newton ( 1725 – 1807 ), published in 1779.

Containing a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, " Amazing Grace " is one of the most recognizable songs in the English-speaking world.

" Amazing Grace " was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year's Day of 1773.

In the United States however, " Amazing Grace " was used extensively during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century.

Author Gilbert Chase writes that " Amazing Grace " is " without a doubt the most famous of all the folk hymns ," and Jonathan Aitken, a Newton biographer, estimates that it is performed about 10 million times annually.

" Amazing Grace " saw a resurgence in popularity in the U. S. during the 1960s and has been recorded thousands of times during and since the 20th century, occasionally appearing on popular music charts.

According to the Dictionary of American Hymnology, " Amazing Grace " is John Newton's spiritual autobiography in verse.

The greatest influences in the 19th century that propelled " Amazing Grace " to spread across the U. S. and become a staple of religious services in many denominations and regions were the Second Great Awakening and the development of shape note singing communities.

William Walker ( composer ) | William Walker, the composer who first joined John Newton's verses to " New Britain ", to create the song that has become " Amazing Grace "

Common meter hymns were interchangeable with a variety of tunes ; more than twenty musical settings of " Amazing Grace " circulated with varying popularity until 1835 when William Walker assigned Newton's words to a traditional song named " New Britain ", which was itself an amalgamation of two melodies (" Gallaher " and " St. Mary ") first published in the Columbian Harmony by Charles H. Spilman and Benjamin Shaw ( Cincinnati, 1829 ).

" Amazing Grace ", with the words written by Newton and joined with " New Britain ", the melody most currently associated with it, appeared for the first time in Walker's shape note tunebook Southern Harmony in 1847.

" Amazing Grace " came to be an emblem of a religious movement and a symbol of the U. S. itself as the country was involved in a great political experiment, attempting to employ democracy as a means of government.

" Amazing Grace " set to " New Britain " was included in two hymnals distributed to soldiers and with death so real and imminent, religious services in the military became commonplace.

Although " Amazing Grace " set to " New Britain " was popular, other versions existed regionally.

Primitive Baptists in the Appalachian region often used " New Britain " with other hymns, and sometimes sing the words of " Amazing Grace " to other folk songs, including titles such as " In the Pines ", " Pisgah ", " Primrose ", and " Evan ", as all are able to be sung in common meter, of which the majority of their repertoire consists.

Moody and Sankey began publishing their compositions in 1875, and " Amazing Grace " appeared three times with three different melodies, but they were the first to give it its title ; hymns were typically published using the first line of the lyrics, or the name of the tune such as " New Britain ".

A publisher named Edwin Othello Excell gave the version of " Amazing Grace " set to " New Britain " immense popularity by publishing it in a series of hymnals that were used in urban churches.

Several editions featuring Newton's first three stanzas and the verse previously included by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin were published by Excell between 1900 and 1910, and his version of " Amazing Grace " became the standard form of the song in American churches.

With the advent of recorded music and radio, " Amazing Grace " began to cross over from primarily a gospel standard to secular audiences.

The ability to record combined with the marketing of records to specific audiences allowed " Amazing Grace " to take on thousands of different forms in the 20th century.

Where Edwin Othello Excell sought to make the singing of " Amazing Grace " uniform throughout thousands of churches, records allowed artists to improvise with the words and music specific to each audience.

" Amazing Grace " is emblematic of several kinds of folk music styles, often used as the standard example to illustrate such musical techniques as lining out and call and response, that have been practiced in both black and white folk music.

Mahalia Jackson employed " Amazing Grace " for Civil Rights marchers, writing that she used it " to give magical protection — a charm to ward off danger, an incantation to the angels of heaven to descend ...

" Folk singer Judy Collins, who knew the song before she could remember learning it, witnessed Fannie Lou Hamer leading marchers in Mississippi in 1964, singing " Amazing Grace ".

Collins decided to record it in the late 1960s amid an atmosphere of counterculture introspection ; she was part of an encounter group that ended a contentious meeting by singing " Amazing Grace " as it was the only song to which all the members knew the words.

There was nothing left to do, I thought ... but sing ' Amazing Grace '.

The science-fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as the person who popularized the use of the term " cyberpunk " as a kind of literature, although Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1980 for his short story " Cyberpunk ," which was published in the November 1983 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories.

Jeron Criswell King ( August 18, 1907 – October 4, 1982 ), born Jeron Criswell Konig, and known by his stage-name The Amazing Criswell (), was an American psychic known for wildly inaccurate predictions.

This was later released as Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega using the Amazing Engine Rules.

He was the author of many hymns, including " Amazing Grace " and " Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken.

Randi began his career as a magician named The Amazing Randi, but after retiring at age 60, he was able to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims, which he collectively calls " woo-woo ".

For example, Spider-Man's high school graduation was published in Amazing Spider-Man # 28 ( September 1965 ), his college graduation in Amazing Spider-Man # 185 ( October 1978 ), and his high school reunion in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man # 7 ( December 2004 ).

' Amazing Grace ' was not the original title of this hymn: it was originally written as a poem entitled ' Faith's Review and Expectation ' and appears in Book I of the Olney Hymns with the poem's title and ' hymn 41 '.

The 1928 publication of Philip Nolan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419, in Amazing Stories was a landmark event.

In 2007, Gellar was featured in Vaseline's " Skin Is Amazing " campaign, with other actors such as Hilary Duff, Amanda Bynes, and John Leguizamo.

* Episode 2 of the first season of The Amazing Race was not aired on the evening of September 12 as scheduled.

* The Savage Land was referenced in the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends episode " The Hunter and the Hunted.

In early 1963, with the success of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, and The Fantastic Four, creator Stan Lee devised the series title after Marvel publisher Martin Goodman turned down the initial name, " The Mutants ", stating that readers would not know what a " mutant " was.

Reality shows with low ratings included The Amazing Race, Lost ( unrelated to the better-known serial drama of the same name ) and The Mole, leading some to speculate that reality television was a temporary fad that had run its course.

The pages of the science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories promoted one such idea from 1945 to 1949 as " the Shaver Mystery ".

Townshend later remarked in the film Amazing Journey, that with Tommy, and with Daltrey's adaptation to portraying the character on-stage, the singer evolved from what was essentially a tight, tough guy to one who outstretched his arms, bared his body to the audiences, and began to truly engage them.

Others, probably influenced by the electric folk pioneered by Fairport Convention from 1969, moved towards more traditional material, a category including Dando Shaft, Amazing Blondel, and Jack the Lad, an offshoot of northern progressive folk group Lindisfarne, who were one of the most successful UK bands of the early 1970s.

Several foundlings appear in Terry Pratchett's Discworld: most notably Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson ( found as a toddler among the ruins of a caravan party attacked by bandits, surrounded by the bodies of the adults ; Carrot was adopted and raised by the dwarfs who discovered him, and was surprised to learn at age 16-and 6ft 6in tall-that he was not a dwarf ; mounting evidence suggests that Carrot is the scion of the deposed Ankh-Morpork royal family, but he himself has suppressed this as much as possible, considering the role of police captain to be a preferable one in which to safeguard his city and keep order ), also Tomjohn ( rightful heir to the throne of Lancre, rescued from his father's killer by loyal servants, entrusted to the local witches and given to travelling actors to raise ; Tomjohn eventually returns to the kingdom, but does not wish to rule it, preferring to remain an actor ) and Keith ( The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents-ironically, Malicia, obsessed with fairytales, is certain that this makes him likely to be a prince, but Keith explains that it is common in the city to abandon babies outside the Guilds where they are likely to receive care and training in a trade ).

However, beginning in 2007, with the introduction of the " Amazing Life " trailer, the Deep Note was extremely cut short to the one pitch ( where both synth notes are in one pitch ), following a variety of instruments that shape like flowers, mushrooms and other plants playing a short tune that plays in the trailer.

He also wrote ' aaa ' - the Amazing Awk Assembler which is one of the longest and most complex programs ever written in the awk programming language.

* The long-running musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice is one of the few major British musical theatre shows with hardly any spoken dialogue, being almost completely sung.

Other notable writers of the turn of the 20th century include Michael Chabon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ( 2000 ) tells the story of two friends, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, as they rise through the ranks of the comics industry in its heyday ; Denis Johnson, whose 2007 novel Tree of Smoke about falsified intelligence during Vietnam both won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was called by critic Michiko Kakutani " one of the classic works of literature produced by Vietnam War "; and Louise Erdrich, whose 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, a distinctly Faulknerian, polyphonic examination of the tribal experience set against the backdrop of murder in the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

* In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of the main characters breaks into the abandoned fairgrounds and the Perisphere itself, where he has a significant sexual experience.

At one point the character Sam Yeager, himself a fan of early twentieth century pulp fiction, recognizes the similarity of the world's predicament to that of sci-fi tales out of Amazing Stories and similar magazines.

* Doc Ock is one of the bosses in The Amazing Spider-Man for the Game Boy.

Octavius is mentioned in Scorpion's bio ( him calling him MAC aka My Amazing Creation ) as one of the scientists at Oscorp that makes cross-species super-humans using Curt Connors research on behalf of an Oscorp Executive Dr. Ratha and Alistaire Smythe.

Described by writer Mike Conroy as " Famously one of Spider-Man's dimmest villains ", the character debuted in Amazing Spider-Man # 41-43 ( Oct .-Dec. 1966 ) as a nameless thug for hire working for an Eastern Bloc country.

* Rhino is one of the villains in The Amazing Spider-Man video game, voiced again by Fred Tatasciore.

Cohn is briefly mentioned in Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as one of protagonist Stanley Konigsberg's classmates at the Horace Mann School.

The Colour of Magic is one of the few of the thirty-nine Discworld novels to be divided into sections or chapters, some others being Pyramids, Going Postal, Making Money, and some of the books for younger readers, specifically The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and the four Tiffany Aching books, The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight.

Their most famous piece is " Amazing Grace ", which reached number one in the charts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada and South Africa in 1972.

Each leg of The Amazing Race generally consists of teams leaving from the previous Pit Stop and traveling to a different location ( often in a different country ), where they perform two or more tasks, generally including one Detour and one Roadblock, before being given instructions to the next Pit Stop.

First appearing in the September 1927 edition of Hugo Gernsback's science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, " The Colour Out of Space " became one of Lovecraft's most popular works and remained his personal favorite short story.

Additionally, just one of the pictures on the package is Ben Reilly, being one art from the cover of Spider-Girl # 94, and another from The Amazing Spider-Man # 509.