Zusatztext Thoroughly engagingÉ. The Pike who emerges from these pages is a true voice without restraint. A fascinating story told by a first-rate historian. Douglas Brinkley This spirited biography never lets goÉ[Robertson] keeps his view of the peripatetic Pike clear-eyed and even-handed. Providence Journal At once sympathetic and probing! provides a fascinating and timely backdrop to many of the struggles faced by mainline Protestant churches today. Publishers Weekly Meticulously researched and crisply writtenÉAn accurate! fair portrait of [a] complicated spiritual iconoclast and theological pioneer. Tucson Citizen Informationen zum Autor David Robertson is the author of two prior biographies, of the slave rebel, Denmark Vesey, and of former U.S. Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, and is the author of a historical novel about John Wilkes Booth. His poetry has appeared in the Sewanee Review and other journals, and he had provided political and literary commentary to ABC News and the Washington Post. He currently is researching the memories of the battle of the Alamo in 1836 and also the lives of Native Americans on the southern frontier in the early nineteenth century. He was educated in Alabama, and lives in Ohio. Klappentext James A. Pike! the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California! was a man of many faces. To some he was an iconoclast! a man decades ahead of his time who modernized the Church and rendered it more progressive and open to inquiry. To others he was a heretic! who polarized and desecrated the Church. Always controversial and charismatic! he took America by storm in the 1960s with his best-selling books! and his weekly television talk show! Dean Pike! which won him a cover story in Time . A Passionate Pilgrim is an illuminating biography of Pike! and an examination of the tragedies! triumphs! and difficulties that shaped his spectacular rise to fame and his mysterious death in the Israeli desert. Chapter I The Pious Boy from Hollywood Hollywood High's first celebrity graduate of the new decade was not a movie star, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. James A. Pike, the controversial Episcopal bishop of California who became the first American religious figure to break into national television, received his diploma from Hollywood High with the summer class of 1930 . John Blumenthal, Hollywood High: The History of America's Most Famous Public School, 1988 James Albert Pike was born on February 14, 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, but for much of the twentieth century he considered himself a Californian. As an adult, Pike had slight interest in the Kentucky origins of his parents or their early attempts at homesteading in Oklahoma. A correspondent once wrote him, shortly before he became the Episcopal bishop of California, asking whether he was related to the notable nineteenth-century military adventurer and frontiersman Zebulon Pike; the future bishop wrote back candidly replying that he did not know if he was a descendant of this pioneer, and it had never occurred to him to wonder whether he was related beyond his immediate family to any earlier Pikes. The twentieth-century James Pike understood his history as beginning in Los Angeles, California, a city where he was moved by his widowed mother when he was eight years old. His mother, Pearl Agatha Pike, was a formidable woman. She had made her way across the country from Curdsville, Kentucky, becoming, successively, by age thirty-one, a farmwife, a mother, a widow, and a self-supporting single parent. She and Pike's father, also named James Albert, were third-generation Kentucky descendants of the pioneer families, surprisingly numerous, who in the late eighteenth century had carried th...

8220;Thoroughly engagingÉ. The Pike who emerges from these pages is a true voice without restraint. A fascinating story told by a first-rate historian.”

–Douglas Brinkley

“This spirited biography never lets goÉ[Robertson] keeps his view of the peripatetic Pike clear-eyed and even-handed.”–Providence Journal

“At once sympathetic and probing, provides a fascinating and timely backdrop to many of the struggles faced by mainline Protestant churches today.” –Publishers Weekly

“Meticulously researched and crisply writtenÉAn accurate, fair portrait of [a] complicated spiritual iconoclast and theological pioneer.” –Tucson Citizen

Autorentext
David Robertson is the author of two prior biographies, of the slave rebel, Denmark Vesey, and of former U.S. Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, and is the author of a historical novel about John Wilkes Booth. His poetry has appeared in the Sewanee Review and other journals, and he had provided political and literary commentary to ABC News and the Washington Post. He currently is researching the memories of the battle of the Alamo in 1836 and also the lives of Native Americans on the southern frontier in the early nineteenth century. He was educated in Alabama, and lives in Ohio.

Klappentext

James A. Pike, the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, was a man of many faces. To some he was an iconoclast, a man decades ahead of his time who modernized the Church and rendered it more progressive and open to inquiry. To others he was a heretic, who polarized and desecrated the Church. Always controversial and charismatic, he took America by storm in the 1960s with his best-selling books, and his weekly television talk show, Dean Pike, which won him a cover story in Time. A Passionate Pilgrim is an illuminating biography of Pike, and an examination of the tragedies, triumphs, and difficulties that shaped his spectacular rise to fame and his mysterious death in the Israeli desert.

Leseprobe
Chapter I

The Pious Boy from Hollywood

Hollywood High’s first celebrity graduate of the new decade was not a movie star, at least not in the conventional sense of the term.
James A. Pike, the controversial Episcopal bishop of California who became the first American religious figure to break into national television, received his diploma from Hollywood High with the summer class of 1930.

—John Blumenthal, Hollywood High: The History of America’s Most Famous Public School, 1988

James Albert Pike was born on February 14, 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, but for much of the twentieth century he considered himself a Californian. As an adult, Pike had slight interest in the Kentucky origins of his parents or their early attempts at homesteading in Oklahoma. A correspondent once wrote him, shortly before he became the Episcopal bishop of California, asking whether he was related to the notable nineteenth-century military adventurer and frontiersman Zebulon Pike; the future bishop wrote back candidly replying that he did not know if he was a descendant of this pioneer, and it had never occurred to him to wonder whether he was related beyond his immediate family to any earlier Pikes. The twentieth-century James Pike understood his history as beginning in Los Angeles, California, a city where he was moved by his widowed mother when he was eight years old.

His mother, Pearl Agatha Pike, was a formidable woman. She had made her way across the country from Curdsville, Kentucky, becoming, successively, by age thirty-one, a farmwife, a mother, a widow, and a self-supporting single parent. She and Pike’s father, also named James Albert, were third-generation Kentucky descendants of the pioneer families, surprisingly numerous, who in the late eighteenth century had carried their Roman Catholicism with them from the eastern seaboard to the Kentucky frontier. The area southwest of Louisville along the mountainous turnings of the Ohio River became known as the “Pike counties” due to the large numbers with that surname who settled …