One of the most influential figures in recent American history, Norman Vincent Peale is a preacher, author, editor and public personality who sparked the post-war revival of religion with his message of practical Christianity. Now Carol George provides the first full-length scholarly account of Peale and his highly visible career, based on interviews with Peale and exclusive access to his personal archives. 30 halftones.
When Donald Trump was married to his first wife Ivana Ivana Zeln ckov in 1977, the family minister who officiated the wedding was the preacher and author of The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale. Perhaps more than any other figure in American public life in the last decade, Donald Trump has been able to reimagine Peale's message of positive thinking to his political advantage. "I never think of the negative," he said after the opening of Trump Tower in 1983. Both Trump and Peale have appealed to people who, like themselves, have felt marginalized by an intellectual and cultural elite. Peale's 1952 book, which helped to drive the religious revival of the 1950s, remains a perennial bestseller, and has affected the lives of a vast public in the United States and around the world. In God's Salesman, Carol V. R. George used interviews with Peale himself as well as exclusive access to his manuscript collection to provide the first full-length scholarly account of Peale and his highly visible career. George explores the evolution of Peale's message of Practical Christianity, the belief that when positive thinking was combined with affirmative prayer, the technique of "imaging," and purposeful action, the result was a changed life. It was a message with special appeal for many in the post-War middle class struggling to rebuild their lives and have a voice in society. George examines the formative influences on Peale's thinking, especially his devout Methodist parents, his early exposure to and then enthusiastic acceptance of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, and his almost instinctive attraction to evangelicalism, particularly as it was manifested politically. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, and with a new foreword by Kate Bowler, God's Salesman remains a timely portrait of the man and his movement, and the vital role that both played in the rethinking and restructuring of American religious life over the last seventy years.
Laced with anecdotes based on the experiences of the author and the many others he has known, loved, mentored, coached, and partnered with, GOD IS A SALESMAN shows us how to translate powerful lessons from God into tools to help us achieve extraordinary success through better relationships, and new dimensions in life.
A biography of Dwight Lyman Moody, a shoe salesman who turned to "selling" God, as he preached, founded Sunday schools and churches, and helped start a Bible institute.
In a sweeping colourful history that spans over two centuries of American culture, Moore examines the role of religion in America as it appropriated (and was appropriated by) commercial culture. He reveals the centrality of religion, and the marketplace, in American popular culture.
At his death on the eve of the 20th century, D.L. Moody was widely recognized as one of the most beloved and important of men in 19th-century America. A Chicago shoe salesman with a fourth grade education, Moody rose from obscurity to become God's man for the Gilded Age. He was the Billy Graham of his day--indeed it could be said that Moody invented the system of evangelism that Graham inherited and perfected. Bruce J. Evensen focuses on the pivotal years during which Moody established his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic through a series of highly popular and publicized campaigns. In four short years Moody forged the bond between revivalism and the mass media that persists to this day. Beginning in Britain in 1873 and extending across America's urban landscape, first in Brooklyn and then in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Boston, Moody used the power of prayer and publicity to stage citywide crusades that became civic spectacles. Modern newspapers, in the grip of economic depression, needed a story to stimulate circulation and found it in Moody's momentous mission. The evangelist and the press used one another in creating a sense of civic excitement that manufactured the largest crowds in municipal history. Critics claimed this machinery of revival was man-made. Moody's view was that he'd rather advertise than preach to empty pews. He brought a businessman's common sense to revival work and became, much against his will, a celebrity evangelist. The press in city after city made him the star of the show and helped transform his religious stage into a communal entertainment of unprecedented proportions. In chronicling Moody's use of the press and their use of him, Evensen sheds new light on a crucial chapter in the history of evangelicalism and demonstrates how popular religion helped form our modern media culture.
Being a Christian sales person is going to be tricky. That's what I thought as I entered my first professional sales position. In retrospect, my life as a Christian sales person was confusing, gut-wrenchingly difficult, frustrating, and wonderfully rewarding. I dealt with questions that you may also face: - How do I balance the need to get results with the Christian ethic of leaving the outcomes to Christ? - Where do I go for support and encouragement in a church where I'm seen as a second class citizen? - How and when do I voice my beliefs on the job, when my employer is not paying me to do that? - How do I maintain my perspective when some of the professional Christians around me are so much more manipulative and deceitful than any secular acquaintance? - How do I maintain my Christian ethics inside a company that supports just the opposite? - How do I grow a consulting practice with no resources and no network? Here's my story.
A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.
Learn how ad men make millions and Jesus changed the world, using these powerful persuasive techniques. Jesus: Salesman for God shows how the awesome power of advertising works in the media, how Jesus used these same sales techniques in the Bible, and how they can work miracles for you in everyday life. Discover how to get family, friends, and fellow workers to see and follow your point of view. Learn how to disagree without getting into an argument. R.W. Klamm can make it happen for you. He combines his easy-to-read, award-winning style with his extensive background in religion, advertising, performance in the magical arts, and vast teaching experience to bring you these life changing insights. There are even a few entertaining presentations for Christian performers. Let Jesus: Salesman for God change your life. Become a salesman, not a huckster, for God. Earlier award winning books by R. W. Klamm: Outfox the Kids for Fun and Profit, makes parenting more fun; Get More Laughs From Your Laughs, makes it fun to be funny; Fly like a Bumblebee, memoirs of a blind magician.
