And universities, too

Today is the birthday of Oral Roberts, born in 1918.

"Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens." -- Montaigne.
 
Be prepared for death at all times, Montaigne had said. The writer’s own brother had succumbed to a blow to the side of his head by a tennis ball. How had he put it? Death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.  --  Chapter 39, The Misforgotten.

Now go, and sin no more

On this day in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham was born.


"Current evangelism is as far as one can go in the pursuit of faith without works. Graham has brought to perfection the notion of a global parish, that is, no parish at all. He is relieved of the need to make private visits, to gather boxes of old clothes in the church basement, to perform weddings, bury the dead, to encourage rummage-sales and pie-suppers. Not only is he relieved, but the saved are also...

"With their salvation kits, they are like patients making a single visit to a clinic and who are therefore recorded in the cure statistics." -- Elizabeth Hardwick.

   As a child Sully had thought about God only when he’d had to. Church was a dreary enough experience: The pastor’s perpetual pleas for donations, the highly unsatisfactory stories sandwiched in-between. The preacher’s exhortations to think of the Almighty as a friend and mentor were lost on Sully, who considered the whole business of God sending His own son down to suffer and die for his sake a pretty nasty one, not to mention a damn convoluted arrangement.  --  Chapter 13, The Misforgotten.