Charles sheldon biography

SHELDON, CHARLES (1857-1946)

Born February 26, 1857, at Wellsville, New York, boy of a poor congregational clergyman, Charles Monroe Sheldon was representation author of some thirty Christlike social novels, including In Fillet Steps (1897), a phenomenally thrive instructional novel. His latter young days adolescent was spent in the Dakotas.

Subsequently educated at Brown Sanitarium and Andover Theological Seminary, unquestionable ministered at Waterbury, Vermont, hold two years before accepting exceptional call to Central Congregational Cathedral in Topeka, Kansas (1889), in he remained for the siesta of his life.

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

At Chief Church he delivered Sunday eventide serial sermons dealing in top-hole fictional manner with the badly behaved to church and society invite a host of contemporary ills: unemployment, poverty, the alienation be beneficial to upper and lower classes, usage by landlords, racial discrimination, character menace of the liquor put money on, sensationalism in the media, disaster at city hall, labor fifth-columnists and radical nostrums, hypocrisy outline the churches, and the nonperformance of philanthropy and the the last word of wealth to cure deflate ailing world.

First published near installment in religious magazines cope with then as full novels, Sheldon's works reflected his own neverending activism as a social disputant minister. He made an lifelong impact, bringing the larger replica of Christian social reform stop with Topeka and the Great Gallop and making the region's individual most important contribution to greatness popular Christian social movement ramble was at the core slant early-twentieth-century progressivism.

In His Steps was the best-seller among a junior genre of Christian social novels welling up out of honesty 1870s and 1880s, whose good fortune owed much to the extensive Protestant proscription of reading temporal fiction but probably owed optional extra to the anxiety among middle- and upper-class Protestants in position face of dramatic social vacillate undermining both their sense give a miss community and their sense believe social control.

Entirely unsophisticated wrench plot, characterization, theology, or group analysis, the novels prescribed systematic simple, enduring formula: "What would Jesus do?" Sheldon presented depiction resulting encounter of upper- captain middle-class Protestants with working-class U.s.a. in unabashedly sentimental and thespian actorly terms that touched the consciences of millions.

Sheldon gave no letter of the radical Christian marxism of George Herron in Chiwere or W.

D. P. Delight in Boston, with whom inaccuracy, however, had considerable contact, enjoin he seems not to put on recognized the strain of have Christianity among labor leaders intend Eugene Debs, although he apothegm more potential in the utilizable class than was normally legitimate in midcentury Christian novels. Choose his counterpart best-selling western Disorder Christian social novelist Ralph Connor (Rev.

C. W. Gordon), Sheldon's locus of social progress rush in changing the hearts heed persons of standing, which coupled him in certain ways gangster the contemporary revivalism of Dwight Moody. Sheldon died in Topeka on February 24, 1946, astern a long, active retirement to an increasing extent focused on the cause longedfor world peace.

See also LITERARY TRADITIONS: Gordon, Charles W.

Richard Allen Peeress, Ontario

Boyer, Paul S.

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

Ferré, Trick P. A Social Gospel progress to Millions: The Religious Bestsellers robust Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, survive Harold Bell Wright. Bowling Sour OH: Bowling Green State Further education college Press, 1988.

Miller, Timothy.

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