Word: evangelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Running a cover story on Glenn Beck is the equivalent of giving a terrorist publicity for setting off a bomb. Beck has made himself rich off people's fears without making the slightest constructive comment on national issues. He's a TV evangelist who makes altar calls and then drives away in his Cadillac...
...take her transgression lightly. First, they pulled out her teeth and fingernails to get information about her underground church in the country's northeast. Then, they threw her in prison for four years. "They demanded to know who was helping me and where they were," says Jeong, an evangelist in her 50s now living in South Korea, who uses an alias to protect her family back home. Despite their efforts, the Northern officials could not stop her. After she fled two years ago, she secretly began sending Christmas gifts to her old church. "Christmas," Jeong says, "would otherwise be meaningless...
Roberts was finally called to meet his alleged maker this week, more than two decades after that melodramatic appeal. He was 91 and died after complications from a fall in his home in California, where he lived in retirement. In the interim, the faith-healing evangelist saw his once enormous religious empire crumble and his son Richard resign as head of ORU in 2007 after allegations of financial malfeasance - a scandal that reportedly left the school with more than $50 million in debt. (Another son, Ronald, committed suicide amid drug rehabilitation in 1982.) (Read "Oral Roberts to the Rescue...
Roberts' university and medical school and the even more ambitious City of Faith medical center he envisioned were institutions that could have transformed him into more than another theatrical evangelist, a descendant of the traveling preachers who made questionable careers saving souls and healing ills while spouting spiritual quackery for people desperate for comfort and accessible transcendence. In 1987, TIME reported that the medical center, which cost $250 million to build, was draining Roberts of $30 million to $40 million a year. In his 1995 autobiography, Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, Roberts revealed that he had undertaken...
Roberts, however, continued to make non-medical claims. Before an audience of 6,000 at ORU in 1987, the evangelist said, "I've had to stop a sermon, go back and raise a dead person," adding good-naturedly, "It did improve my altar call that night." Roberts provided no details. Later his son Richard expanded the revivification claim, asserting that in 50 or 60 cases, Oral and other ministers had raised the dead. It was, perhaps, not that great a leap from one of the original miracles that helped make Roberts' name in the 1950s: he claimed to have prayed...