Word: preacherly
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...preacher's urging, people start to stand one by one. The momentum builds and soon about 400 of the audience of 1,500 are on their feet. "I speak to the spirit of infirmity. I command the arthritis to come out of your neck, in the name of Jesus!" Then the preacher demands that people begin moving their ailing limbs and joints: "I know it sounds crazy, but just...
Oral Roberts, a smalltown, small-time Pentecostal Holiness preacher, swept out of the Oklahoma prairie in 1947, drawing legions of both disciples and scoffers. He is now an "ordained elder" in the United Methodist Church, presiding over Tulsa's 4,200-student Oral Roberts University and hosting a weekly TV show seen on 241 stations in the U.S. and abroad, and on a religious cable network. Total weekly audience in the U.S.: 3 million. Roberts occasionally appears on a prime time program as well. He is also trying to complete the $250 million City of Faith medical center. Last...
...preacher of Ecclesiastes gave the list of sublime inevitabilities: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." There was once a cultural geographer named Ellsworth Huntington who suggested-ethnocentrically, his critics later said-that people who lived without seasons could never develop character. So much for the mañana cultures. So much, in fact, for San Diego. Such cultures had no Darwinian need for foresight, Huntington thought, no drive to store up nuts for winter. They did not feel that stirring of energy and anticipation and pragmatic dread when the first chill...
Between the catcalls and the wild charges, the Falwell visit produced a pretty sterile debate. The K-School audience's shameful rudeness simply enhanced Falwell's poised image, and the preacher easily glided through the thicket of questions. When he had arguments ready, he used them. When stumped--us he was by a query asking why he opposes abortion but favors the death penalty--he resorted smoothly to his usual vapid rhetoric ("I want everybody to have the benefits of pluralism.") It was, on the whole, a silly evening...
MAKE NO MISTAKE--Falwell is a charlatan, and a dangerous one. His illiberal views on gay rights, school prayer, and national defense would, if enacted into law, imperil civil rights and world peace. But the preacher's enormous popularity is no mere media trick. He speaks to deep-seated feelings of confusion and discontent among the American people. Like 1930s rightist radio clergyman Father Charles Coughlin, Falwell provides Americans beset by hard times an answer to their problems: Return to tradition and authority. And he does so in terms that resonate deep within our collective imagination--God and Country...