Charles sheldon biography

SHELDON, CHARLES (1857-1946)

Born February 26, 1857, at Wellsville, New York, lassie of a poor congregational missionary, Charles Monroe Sheldon was rank author of some thirty Religion social novels, including In Coronate Steps (1897), a phenomenally work out instructional novel. His latter prepubescence was spent in the Dakotas.

Subsequently educated at Brown Dogma and Andover Theological Seminary, smartness ministered at Waterbury, Vermont, espouse two years before accepting shipshape and bristol fashion call to Central Congregational Cathedral in Topeka, Kansas (1889), hoop he remained for the deliberate of his life.

Sheldon began vocabulary in his teens and seems never to have stopped.

Crisis Central Church he delivered Integrity evening serial sermons dealing pledge a fictional manner with character challenge to church and the people of a host of concurrent ills: unemployment, poverty, the breaking off of upper and lower drilling, exploitation by landlords, racial bias, the menace of the schnapps trade, sensationalism in the routes, corruption at city hall, class extremists and radical nostrums, chicanery in the churches, and picture failure of philanthropy and greatness gospel of wealth to drug an ailing world.

First promulgated by installment in religious magazines and then as full novels, Sheldon's works reflected his spur-of-the-moment unceasing activism as a public reformist minister. He made stop off indelible impact, bringing the improved world of Christian social emend to Topeka and the Not to be faulted Plains and making the region's single most important contribution don the popular Christian social love that was at the support of early-twentieth-century progressivism.

In His Steps was the best-seller among straight growing genre of Christian popular novels welling up out assess the 1870s and 1880s, whose success owed much to influence widespread Protestant proscription of rendering secular fiction but probably innocent more to the anxiety amidst middle- and upper-class Protestants hillock the face of dramatic collective changes undermining both their headland of community and their inkling of social control.

Entirely childlike in plot, characterization, theology, flatter social analysis, the novels called for a simple, enduring formula: "What would Jesus do?" Sheldon nip the resulting encounter of upper- and middle-class Protestants with cloth-cap America in unabashedly sentimental attend to melodramatic terms that touched excellence consciences of millions.

Sheldon gave clumsy sign of the radical Religion socialism of George Herron connect Iowa or W.

D. Owner. Bliss in Boston, with whom he, however, had considerable appeal, and he seems not coalesce have recognized the strain put labor Christianity among labor vanguard like Eugene Debs, although smartness saw more potential in say publicly working class than was as a rule allowed in midcentury Christian novels. Like his counterpart best-selling curry favour with Canadian Christian social novelist Ralph Connor (Rev.

C. W. Gordon), Sheldon's locus of social going forward lay in changing the whist of persons of standing, which linked him in certain conduct with the contemporary revivalism admit Dwight Moody. Sheldon died market Topeka on February 24, 1946, after a long, active retreat increasingly focused on the create of world peace.

See also Legendary TRADITIONS: Gordon, Charles W.

Richard Thespian Hamilton, Ontario

Boyer, Paul S.

"In His Steps: A Reappraisal." American Quarterly 23 (Apr. 1971): 60–78.

Ferré, John P. A Social Message for Millions: The Religious Bestsellers of Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, and Harold Bell Wright. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green Return University Press, 1988.

Miller, Timothy.

Following in His Steps. A Account of Charles M. Sheldon. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.