Billy Graham has scarcely lacked for historians’ attention, and Grant Wacker's 2014 biography, America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Belknap Press), might make one wonder what is left to say. A lot, as this collection of eleven essays originating in a 2013 Wheaton College conference well illustrates.

The essays uplift not merely fascinating but important dimensions of Graham's career and impact. Andrew Finstuen and Edith Blumhofer explore, respectively, Graham's intriguing college preaching and the critical role of music in revivals where the evangelist “suffered from ‘the malady of no melody,’” as George Beverly Shea put it (65). Curtis Evans unravels the persistence, persuasiveness, and limits of Graham's emphasis on individual conversion as a solution to social ills in America and the world. Darren Dochuk writes a nearly revelatory essay on Graham's long dalliance with “heavenly Houston,” where “new money, technology, and corporate might” might bring religious and social change without coercive federal legislation (177, 183). Seth Dowland explores Graham's “new evangelical manhood” which all but displaced Sinclair Lewis's fictional Elmer Gantry with Graham's “virile serenity,” as a Playboy reporter put it (216). And one can almost feel the quiet drama that unfolds inside Anne Blue Wills's portrayal of Ruth Graham's struggle to blend the public and the private as a good evangelist's wife, down to and including a resigned agreement to be buried in a place she had never wanted, pleasing Billy who was pleasing Franklin Graham, neither thinking to please her.

There is more: Michael Hamilton on Graham's preaching strategies, William Martin on his often misdirected foreign “crusades,” David King on Graham's version of evangelical humanitarianism, Elesha Coffman on Graham and the media, and Steven Miller on Graham's image, plus an introduction by Wacker, an afterword by Margaret Bendroth, and an epilogue by Ken Garfield.

The essays are persistently analytical not worshipful. They do not offer a unified view, and they don't pretend to solve problems. Thorny issues such as Graham's troubling civil rights record remain as fodder for more debate. Rather, they poke, prod, and push with range and sophistication, making clear that Graham, like George Whitefield before him, will be with history and historians for a long, long time.