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Groton Daily Independent
Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 223 ~ 36 of 52
“I am extremely, extremely angry and sad,” 16-year-old student Alfonso Calderon said at a news confer- ence at the Statehouse after meeting with lawmakers. “I don’t know if I will have faith in my state and local government anymore.”
He added, “People are losing their lives and it’s still not being taken seriously.”
___
This story has been edited to correct the name of the school to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,
instead of Marjorie. ___
Associated Press writers Terry Spencer and Kelli Kennedy in Parkland, Freida Frisaro in Miami, Joe Reedy in Tallahassee and Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg contributed to this report.
Billy Graham went from tent revivals to the White House By RACHEL ZOLL and JONATHAN DREW, Associated Press
MONTREAT, N.C. (AP) — As a young man, he practiced his sermons by preaching to the alligators and birds in the swamp. At his height years later, he was bringing the word of God into living rooms around the globe via TV and dispensing spiritual counsel — and political advice — to U.S. presidents.
The Rev. Billy Graham, dubbed “America’s Pastor” and the “Protestant Pope,” died Wednesday at his North Carolina home at age 99 after achieving a level of in uence and reach no other evangelist is likely ever to match.
More than anyone else, the magnetic, Hollywood-handsome Graham built evangelicalism into a force that rivaled liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the United States.
The North Carolina-born Graham transformed the tent revival into an event that lled football arenas, and reached the masses by making pioneering use of television in prosperous postwar America. By his nal crusade in 2005, he had preached in person to more than 210 million people worldwide.
All told, he was the most widely heard Christian evangelist in modern history.
“Graham is a major historical gure, not merely to American evangelicals, but to American Christianity in general,” said Bill Leonard, a professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School in North Carolina. Graham was “the closest thing to a national Protestant chaplain that the U.S. has ever had.”
A tall gure with swept-back hair, blue eyes and a strong jaw, Graham was a commanding presence in the pulpit with a powerful baritone voice. His catchphrase: “The Bible says ...”
Despite his international renown, he would be the rst to say his message was not complex or unique. But he won over audiences with his friendliness, humility and unyielding religious conviction.
He had an especially strong in uence on the religion and spirituality of American presidents, starting with Dwight Eisenhower. George W. Bush credited Graham with helping him transform himself from carousing, hard-drinking oilman to born-again Christian family man.
His in uence reached beyond the White House. He delivered poignant remarks about the nation’s wounds in the aftermath of Sept. 11 during a message from Washington National Cathedral three days after the attacks. He met with boxer Muhammad Ali in 1979 to talk about religion. He showed up in hurricane- ravaged South Carolina in the 1980s and delivered impromptu sermons from the back of a pickup truck to weary storm victims.
In the political arena, his organization took out full-page ads in support of a ballot measure that would ban gay marriage. Critics blasted Graham on social media on Wednesday for his stance on gay rights.
Graham wasn’t always a polished presence in the pulpit. After World War II, as an evangelist in the U.S. and Europe with Youth for Christ, he was dubbed “the Preaching Windmill” for his arm-swinging and rapid- re speech.
His rst meeting with a U.S. president, Harry Truman, was a disaster. Wearing a pastel suit and loud tie that he would later say made him look like a vaudeville performer, the preacher, unfamiliar with protocol, told reporters what he had discussed with Truman, then posed for photos.
But those were early stumbles on his path to fame and in uence.