| Oral Roberts: Televangelist (Coronet Magazine, 1955) When this article about the media-savvy preacher Oral Roberts (1918 – 2009) hit the newsstands in 1955, his television program was less than a year old, and yet his name was already a household word in many corners of the United States. His sermons were heard every Sunday on a radio show that was broadcast by over two hundred outlets across the fruited plane and he lorded over a film production company that produced movies seen on almost 100 television stations. Indeed, Robert's ministry/corporation employed hundreds of people on its payroll, owned a Tulsa office building and a large swath of Oklahoma real estate and the thirty-seven year old preacher had even grander plans for the future. 
The editors at CORONET recognized that Oral Roberts was not your average minister, who was simply contented to preside over thirty full pews every week; they labeled him a "businessman-preacher" and subtly pointed out that the man's detractors were many and his flashy attire unseemly for a member of clergy:
"God doesn't run a breadline...I make no apology for buying the best we can afford. The old idea that religious people should be poor is nonsense." Were the Jews Responsible for the Death of Jesus? (The Literary Digest, 1897)The French archeologist and mathematician Théodore Reinach (1860 – 1928) believed that the answer to the question posted above was a big, fat "no", and he turned to two ancient sources for his answer: a sentence form Tacitus and a paragraph by Josephus:
"The paragraph by Josephus has given rise to an immense literature. Every word of the paragraph has been studied and commented on. All the works of Josephus have been cherished by the Christian Church as a sort of preface to the Evangelists."
"It is not then the execution of Jesus, it is the long martyrdom of Israel which constitutes the greatest judicial error in the history of man...Judaism has been expiating for nearly sixteen centuries, by daily humiliations and incessant persecutions a crime it never committed and which it had not even the power to commit."
The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
The Conversion of an Atheist (Coronet Magazine, 1955)Throughout the course of her life Lillian Roth (1910 - 1980) had lived the high life and the low, and during a dark moment while she sat pining in the depth of her anguish a well-wisher approached her with a unique line of reasoning that was so pure in its simplicity it immediately lead her to realize that God does indeed exist:
"Lillian, you think of God. Why? Because God exists. If He did not exist, you could not have thought of Him."
"You cannot imagine anything completely non-existent. No matter what you think of, however bizarre or fantastic: a five-legged man, a mind composed of mist and echo, an impossible creature from another planet - you discover that part of your concept is based on reality. So it is with God: for if any part of the concept of God is real, then God Himself is real."
The attached is an excerpt from her 1955 book, I'll Cry Tomorrow . The Spiritual Disillusion of the 1920s (Current Opinion, 1919)At the thirty-fifth annual church congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1919) clergy members seemed to agree that Christian leaders were fully complicit in the recently ended war and were guilty of abandoning Christianity for patriotism: "Christianity has betrayed itself body and soul". When W.W. II started, Americans went back to church... In 1900 people wanted to know why men didn't like going to church... The Roman Catholic Devotion to Mary (Literary Digest, 1897)Attached is an 1897 article from an American news magazine in which the uncredited journalist attempted to explain to his largely Protestant readers the reasoning behind that uniquely Roman Catholic brand of piety that emphasis the Virgin Mary (Protestant Christians have tended to feel that such dutiful obligations to the Virgin have served to upstage Jesus and His message):
"From all eternity He chose her to become the mother of the Word who was to clothe Himself in human flesh. He so distinguished her, too from among all that is most beautiful in the three orders of nature. of grace, and of glory that the church justly attributes to this Virgin the following words: ' I came out of the Mouth of the Most High, the first-born before all creatures.'" Male Church Attendance Drops (Literary Digest, 1929)A report from "The Literary Digest" revealed that only one man out of every nine attended Sunday services with any regularity in 1929. The article quotes one wounded clergymen who predicted doom for the American culture as a whole, and interviewed an assorted number of church-goers of the male variety who offered a number sound reasons to attend weekly services, none of them having anything to do with the Gospels. However 317 out of 320 interviewed all concurred that their participation helps them attain "a sense of the presence of God" in their lives. Click here to read an article from 1900 about why men dislike going to church. When W.W. II started, Americans went back to church... | 
