Word: swaggart
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brought low by carnal temptation. The image may seem to leap from today's headlines, but Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are only the latest in a long line that stretches back to the fictional Arthur Dimmesdale, yearning for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. After such falls from grace are revealed, the question always arises: Were the sinners truly devout souls brought to perdition or fiendish fakers from the start? That is precisely the issue raised by American literature's most exuberant portrait of religious hysteria and hypocrisy, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 Elmer Gantry...
There are at the moment plenty of fire-breathing Swaggart videotapes on the shelf to fill a three-month or one-year void on TV. However, PTL cable decided last week to continue the daily show only if Swaggart does not preside, and Robertson's CBN said it would run the Sunday worship hour only if Swaggart did not preach. Secular stations, however, may be happy to run old Swaggart tapes, so long as the payments arrive on time...
...renovated PTL cannot afford to take any chances with their images. As the Bakkers' escapades showed, the sins of one preacher will be laid upon another. Swaggart's downfall will add to the broad-brush contempt that many are heaping on the evangelical and Pentecostalist religions, even though the video brigade is but a small part of these movements. It was ironical that a Broadway-bound play, based on Elmer Gantry, opened in Washington...
Though much is unclear about Swaggart's prospects, the preacher wrote in his magazine last month that God had given him an important glimpse of the future through a dream vision. In it, Jimmy and Frances attend a large meeting, where an Assemblies of God stage show is being promoted with magazines that contain obscene pictures in their centerfolds. Jimmy cries out in protest but is ignored. He bows to weep, and when he looks up again, the auditorium is empty. The floor is littered with debris, which Jimmy starts to collect. When someone asks him what he is doing...
RELIGION: Sexual sins sideline Jimmy Swaggart, the fiery king of televangelism...