Culture

Oral Roberts Died Today: A Story for my Mother and Grandmother

by YankeeJim | December 15, 2009 at 01:56 pm

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Oral Roberts died today. My Mother and my Grandmother were deeply religious people, and the likes of evangelists appealed to them. If you are going to be a religious person, why not throw your heart and soul into it? I can tolerate it, even if I would not go so far as to respect that behavior. I was surrounded by religious fervor growing up and wrote about it in my memoir because I devoted much of my life trying understanding it, the phenomenon of human invention, evangelism. I ended up being a watered-down Christian that I spruced up by converting to Catholicism before abandoning all of that for becoming a human being with kindly values. Bless you Oral with your own words and beliefs. YJ

“Television evangelist Oral Roberts dies University founder had complications from pneumonia; he was 91 TULSA, Okla - Oral Roberts, the evangelist who rose from humble tent revivals to found a multimillion-dollar ministry and a university bearing his name, died Tuesday. He was 91. Roberts died of complications from pneumonia in Newport Beach, Calif., according to his spokesman, A. Larry Ross. The evangelist was hospitalized after a fall on Saturday. He had survived two heart attacks in the 1990s and a broken hip in 2006. Roberts was a pioneer on two fronts — he helped bring spirit-filled charismatic Christianity into the mainstream and took his trademark revivals to television, a new frontier for religion.”