Word: preacher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dedicated by Ellison "to that Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes"--he proudly and defiantly resisted the successive fads to rename that tribe--Juneteenth turns on the complex relationship between an ex-jazzman and trickster turned preacher, Alonzo Hickman, and his white--or nearly white--foster child, Bliss. Hickman reluctantly agrees to midwife and then raise this child of a white woman whose false accusation of rape had caused his brother to be lynched. Bliss, though lovingly nurtured by his stepfather, eventually runs away in search of his lost mother and later transforms himself into Senator...
Still, one can ask how so theatrical a preacher became central to the U.S. of the past half-century. Always an authentic revivalist, Graham has evaded both doctrine and denomination. He sounds not at all like a Fundamentalist, even though he affirms the fundamentals--the literal truth of the Bible: the virgin birth, atoning death and the bodily resurrection of Christ; the Second Coming; salvation purely through grace by faith and not works. Graham's most important book, Peace with God (1953), is light-years away from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, which is revered by Fundamentalists. Everything that is harsh...
That is now a period piece, but I think it is important to keep it on the record. Graham, a slow but sure learner, moved with the spirit of the age, and in the 1980s he became a preacher of world peace, urging reconciliation with Russia and China, where his wife Ruth, the daughter of missionaries, was born. Angry Fundamentalists turned against him, a move that became an anti-Graham passion when he rejected the program of the Christian right: "I don't think Jesus or the Apostles took sides in the political arenas of their day." The break between...
...course, there are those whose intentions were malign but not all that influential, whose perniciousness petered out. Father Coughlin's anti-Semitic rants on the wireless never really amounted to much. Preacher Billy Sunday swore that when Prohibition finally came, "Hell would be rent forever." Fat chance of that happening anytime soon. George Wallace's cry of "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" lasted only a decade before it was relegated to the dustbin of ugly 19th century prejudices. Call this the When Bad People Don't Do All That Much Damage theory of history...
...year Harvard was founded, Thomas Hooker, the first preacher in Newtowne--present-day Cambridge--and his congregation packed up and moved to what is now Hartford, Conn...