Acknowledgments
I
have spent much time with Kathryn Kuhlman over the last several years. I watched her videos, read her books, and read books about her. I talked with people who knew her and claimed to have been healed by her. I put on lint-free gloves and pored over snapshots in her few personal scrapbooks, looking with a magnifying glass for a glimpse of who she might have been before she became who she was. So my first thank you goes to you, Miss Kuhlman, as you were called. Thanks for making me think, wonder, and laugh. Thank you to my mom and dad for the love and support that enabled me to go on this adventure without really knowing where it would take me. Thanks to you, I never had to be afraid. Thank you to my brother and sisters and their families and also to my mother-in-law for encouraging me and making me feel proud of my work. Thank you to the Billy Graham Center archivists at Wheaton College for expressing genuine interest in my research and always making me feel welcome; to Wayne Warner for your generous spirit and wealth of Kuhlman information and photographs; to Edith Blumhofer and Clark Gilpin for taking the time to read this manuscript as a dissertation and make it stronger through your insight and reflections; and to Catherine Brekus for your patience, wisdom, and guidance from graduate school to now. You once told me you never stopped believing in me. Thank you for that. Thank you to David Bratt and all the wonderful people at the Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. for welcoming me to the Library of Religious Biography family. Thank you to Kate Bowler for the willingness to contribute a foreword that sets Kuhlman in the larger story you know so well. xi