Grant Wacker, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Christian History at Duke Divinity School, has co-edited and written the introduction to a book providing fresh insights and a nuanced look into the life and legacy of the Rev. Billy Graham.

The book, Billy Graham: American Pilgrim, was published by Oxford University Press and features contributions from a number of distinguished scholars. Wacker’s co-editors were Andrew Finstuen, dean of the Honors College at Boise State University, and Anne Blue Wills, associate professor of religion at Davidson College.

Wacker and the other contributors demonstrate how throughout his six-decade career, Graham mainstreamed evangelism and through that tradition brought about major changes to American Christianity, global Christianity, church and state, the Cold War, race relations, American manhood, intellectual life, and religious media and music.

“Billy Graham: American Pilgrim aims to help college and seminary students, as well as thoughtful readers everywhere, understand how a very average farm kid from the South became one of the most memorable and compelling Christian leaders of the twentieth century,” stated Wacker, the author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture and America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation.

Wills and two of the contributors, Seth Dowland, associate professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University, and Elesha Coffman, assistant professor of history at Baylor University, each earned a Ph.D. in the Graduate Program in Religion at Duke.