On 25 September 1949 a thirty-one-year-old preacher from North Carolina, Billy Graham, began what was to be a three-week revival under a Ringling Brothers circus tent in Los Angeles. Crowds were impressive but not at capacity until press magnate William Randolph Hearst catapulted Graham into the national spotlight with a two-word memo to his associates: "Puff Graham." Now the hottest ticket in town, 350,000 came to hear him, including Gene Autry and Jane Russell. Cecil B. DeMille offered him a screen test. Three weeks stretched into eight, and the postwar revival of religion in America had found its champion.

Source: William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York: Morrow, 1991).

Merton and Gandhi.

The year 1948 saw the release of two huge best-sellers: Lloyd C. Douglas's novel about Peter, The Big Fisherman, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton's spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Also appearing...