The Electronic Christian 105 Readings Author:Fulton J. Sheen Radio is like the Old Testament, Fulton J. Sheen once said: listening to it, you can hear the work of God. And tlevision is like the New Testament: you not only hear the word of God but also see it incarnated before your very eyes. If there is truth in simile, then in his more that fifty years of electonic evangelization, Fulton J. Sheen has bro... more »ught the Old Testament to millions and the New Testament to billions.
Half the Sundays from 1930 to 1952, you might have heard Sheen preaching the word of God on radio. He made the first network religious radiocast. sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men; and in the years that Sheen was the mainstay of "The Catholic Hour," the station received more than 700,000 letters.
In 1952 Sheen left Sunday afternoon radio for prime-time television. Although such religious programming was a first, network executives did not expect it to survive. In competing time-slots on the other networks were Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra. On "Life Is Worth Living," however, Sheen told jokes too, but he also taught orthodox Christian doctrine and solid Christian spirituality. The program not only survived, it flourished. At the end of the first season, Sheen won an Emmy, television's highest award. By 1954 an estimated twhnty-five million viewers watched the program each week.
Although Sheen's radio audience was largely Catholic and his television audience mostly Jewish and Protestent, his appeal did not follow exclusively sectarian lines. He urged the faithful of various Chrsitian communities to become even more devout. The lasped from one communion or another he coaxed to return. The unchurched or whatever persuasion he encouraged to convert. Among the converts of his own electronic evangelization he numbered editor Louis Budenz, playwright Clare Boothe Luce, Russian spy Elizabeth Bentley, violinist Fritz Kreisler, and manufacturer Henry Ford II. For every celebrity conversion, there were a hundred more whose notoriety was known only to the Lord.
What one Christian of the electronic era believes is the subject of this anthology. Selections have been taken from twenty-two of Fulton J. Sheen's more than seventy works. The readings are thematically arranged, informally systematized, and devotionally styled. Sources of the readings are given at the end of the book.« less