The Rhetorical Leadership of Fulton J. Sheen, Norman Vincent Peale, and Billy Graham in the Age of Extremes [Paperback]

Fulton J. Sheen, Norman Vincent Peale, and Billy Graham were Americas most popular religious leaders during the mid-twentieth century period known as the golden years of the Age of Extremes. It was part of an era that encompassed polemic contrasts of good and evil on the world stage in political philosophies and international relations. The 1950s and early 1960s, in particular, were years of high anxiety, competing ideologies, and hero/villain mania in America. Sheen was the voice of reason who spoke against those conflicting ideologies which were hostile to religious faith and democracy; Peale preached the gospel of reassurance, self-assurance, and success despite ominous global threats; and Graham was the heroic model of faith whose message of conversion provided Americans an identity and direction opposite to atheistic communism. This study looks at how and why their rhetorical leadership, both separately and together, contributed to the climate of an extreme era and influenced a national religious revival.Timothy H. Sherwood, DMin, PhD, is a Roman Catholic priest for the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida. He currently serves as pastor at St. Raphael Catholic Parish in St. Petersburg and is an independent researcher in rhetorical criticism, homiletics, and leadership studies. He is the author of The Preaching of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: The Gospel Meets the Cold War.

Sherwoods argument is an interesting one, and he well substantiates his premises. The Catholic Historical Review

Sherwood does an admirable job in summarizing an enormous amount of material concerning the rise of American anxiousness from about 1940 to 1970, including the rise of psychiatry, paranoia over the Bomb and the Red Scare, and the rise of self-help books. . . .Sherwoods book goes a long way in demonstrating the powerful rhetoric of three outstanding lives. They illustrate just how words may make us. Homiletic

To the questions What am I to think? lƒ