Sister Amiss
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
by Matthew
Avery Sutton
Harvard University Press, 2007
(351 pages, $26.95, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
Matthew Avery Sutton, of the history faculty at Oakland University (of which this reviewer is an alumnus), himself raised in the environs of the Foursquare Church of Sister Aimee’s founding, has done what he can in this book to cast her as something of a world-historical character. Because he has written an honest and workmanlike biography, however, he has in the end drawn the portrait of a woman who, while in many ways extraordinary, and a memorable character in the fantastic cavalcade of American folk religion, lacks something of the symbolic weight he seems to have set out to find.
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