From Oregon to Florida, and from Texas to North Dakota; from the tens of thousands Billy Graham's recent crusade brought to New York's Central Park to the evangelical activists who mobilized support for Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp at the 1988 Iowa caucuses, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory crisscrosses the country to take readers on a journey into the heart of evangelical America. We visit an old-fashioned holiness camp meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, an Indian reservation in the Dakotas, a huge trade show for Christian booksellers, and a fundamentalist Bible camp in the Adirondacks. But what stands out most in this book is the people Balmer meets on his journey, ranging from the evangelical filmmaker Donald Thompson to Pentecostal faith healers to fervent young evangelists working the beaches of southern California. It is through their eyes that we see into the heart of American evangelicalism, that we grasp the genuine appeal of the movement, and thereby arrive at a more accurate and balanced understanding of an abiding tradition that, as the author argues, is both rich in theological insights and mired in contradictions. For this edition, Balmer has added two new chapters, one offering a fascinating profile of disgraced TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, and the other a behind-the-scenes portrait of a Christian rock band on tour.
A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and formerly a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. He has lectured at the Chautauqua Institution, the Commonwealth Club of California and the Smithsonian Associates and to audiences around the country. He has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and at Rutgers, Yale, Drew, Northwestern, and Princeton universities. He is adjunct professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary, and he has also been a visiting professor in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Mr. Balmer, who earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985, has published widely both in academic and scholarly journals and in the popular press. He is an editor for Christianity Today, and his commentaries on religion in America, distributed by the New York Times Syndicate, have appeared in newspapers across the country. He has published opinion pieces in the Des Moines Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the San Diego Times-Union, the Dallas Morning News, Slate, the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Newsday, the Albany Times-Union, the Nation and the New York Times. His first book, "A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies," won several awards, and his second book, "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America," now in its fourth edition, was made into a three-part documentary for PBS. Mr. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for his script-writing and for hosting that series.
His second documentary, "Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham," was aired on PBS and also appeared in A&E's Biography series. "'In the Beginning': The Creationist Controversy," a two-part documentary on the creation-evolution debate, was first broadcast over PBS in May 1995 and then recut and broadcast in fall 2001.
The author of a dozen books, Mr. Balmer has co-written a history of American Presbyterians, a book on mainline Protestantism, and another book, "Protestantism in America," with Lauren F. Winner. Other books include "Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism," published by Baylor University Press, and "Religion in Twentieth Century America," part of the Religion in American Life series, published by Oxford University Press. A spiritual memoir, "Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father's Faith," published by Brazos Press in 2001, was named "book of the year" (spirituality) by Christianity Today. More recently, "God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush," was released by HarperOne in January 2008, and "The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond" was published by Baylor University Press in 2010.
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