“Hello! And have you been waiting for me?” So began each episode of Kathryn Kuhlman's popular radio broadcast Heart-to-Heart in the 1940s and, for a time, each television broadcast of I Believe in Miracles from 1966 to 1975. According to Amy Collier Artman (instructor in religious studies at Missouri State University), whether knowing it or not, scholars of American religion have been “waiting” for Kathryn Kuhlman to get the attention her life and ministry warrants. To this end, Artman has done us a great service in demonstrating the prominent and, yet, largely unrecognized role Kuhlman played in shaping contemporary perceptions of charismatic Christianity.

Relying on the collections of the Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation, Artman had access to five hundred episodes of Kuhlman's television show I Believe in Miracles, hundreds of radio broadcasts, three books cataloging testimonies to divine healing, various press clippings offering news and commentary on Kuhlman's ministry, three (uncritical) biographies, and multiple scrapbooks. These materials serve to give the researcher what Kuhlman wanted: a meticulously choreographed image of herself. This, I imagine, was one of the challenges Artman had in writing a biography where “no private correspondence or diaries are available” (10). As Artman acknowledges, lacking these other primary sources, many of the questions we have about Kuhlman's life and ministry are left to speculation.

Over six chapters (and an epilogue), The Miracle Lady makes a contribution to the current discussions surrounding religious change in America, specifically religious change due to the influence of various media. To this Artman adapts an “evocative” and “provocative” term most often associated with discussions of urbanization: “gentrification.” It is a helpful term in describing what Artman sees as Kuhlman's role in the “transformation of charismatic Christianity from a suspect form of religion to a respectable form of religiosity that was accepted and even celebrated by mainstream Christianity and culture by the end of the twentieth century” (5). The Miracle Lady places Artman among other scholars of American religion who have also focused on religious transformation such as Tona Hangen, Grant Wacker, D. G. Hart, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Kate Bowler, Joel Carpenter, Jon Butler, Matthew Avery Sutton, and David Wells, among others.

In chapter 1, we learn of Kuhlman's birth in 1907 in Concordia, Missouri and conversion to Christianity at age fourteen. Kuhlman's further growth in the faith and early exposure to Pentecostalism would come in the summer of 1924 at age seventeen when she joined her older sister and brother-in-law evangelist for a preaching tour throughout various western states. Aimee Semple McPherson is described as an early, if indirect, influence—an influence Kuhlman would deny throughout her ministry career.

Chapter 2 describes Kuhlman's new identity as a “faith healer.” Central to this chapter is demonstrating how Kuhlman's ministry contributed to the gentrification of charismatic Christianity by working “to present a more refined image of charismatic Christianity and its most public practice, divine healing” (45).

Chapter 3 explores Kuhlman's embrace of television as “the only female healing evangelist to make the transition to television in the 1950s” (68). Television for Kuhlman was a means of “shifting the emphasis to divine healing and away from Holy Ghost baptism or being ‘born again’” (79).

In chapter 4, Artman considers Kuhlman as a “woman leader but not women's liberator.” Artman laments: “Kuhlman chose not to support women's efforts at equality in female religious leadership. Although she succeeded in her own right, she failed to use her leverage to help dismantle the oppressive system that placed obstacles in the way of female religious leaders like her” (90).

In chapter 5, Kuhlman is seen at the height of her ministry influence as the host of “a new kind of talk show.” I Believe in Miracles, for Artman, is Kuhlman's main contribution to the gentrification of charismatic Christianity as it mediated an experience of charismatic Christianity more suitable to the masses.

Chapter 6 details the film Dry Land, Living Water, a syndicated special recorded in Las Vegas with the goal of bringing to a television audience the full experience of one of Kuhlman's miracle services.

In the epilogue, Artman describes Kuhlman's deteriorating health due to heart disease, the controversial changing of her will, and her death at the age of sixty-nine. (Significantly, Kuhlman is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, the same place as Aimee Semple McPherson. This is an irony Artman does not mention, perhaps to keep Kuhlman out of the shadow of McPherson's ministry, as Kuhlman would have wanted.) Artman concludes the book by considering Kuhlman's spiritual “heirs,” being careful to position her descendants safely away from Benny Hinn and various other prosperity preachers.

There is much to commend about The Miracle Lady. Artman demonstrates an expert grasp of Pentecostalism and its “descendant, charismatic Christianity” (9). Artman takes both seriously, treating their ideas and commitments with the respect of an “insider” even as she writes a critical biography like an “outsider.” Furthermore, Artman does an excellent job describing the context of Kuhlman's ministry—not only its religious context, but its larger cultural context with the advent of radio and television, feminism, the rise of Norman Vincent Peale and “positive thinking,” and the mood of post–World War II America. This is a fine work of intellectual and cultural history.

What about the relationship of Kathryn Kuhlman to the gentrification of charismatic Christianity? Is Artman's thesis convincing? To some degree, yes. However, for it to be stronger, there needs to be more evidence that what was experienced privately (through Kuhlman's radio and television ministries) actually had significant public outcomes. Here is where the dearth of other primary sources hurts Artman's cause. The reader wonders how many markets did Kuhlman's ministries reach? Audience size? Letters from audience members? Information about who financially supported the ministry? More news stories from the popular periodicals of the day to demonstrate gentrification? Apart from these sources we are left mainly to speculate about the gentrification thesis.

What seems to be without question is the gentrification of Kathyrn Kuhlman. From her humble beginnings in Missouri to her international reputation as a faith healer and evangelist, Kuhlman moved from obscurity to prominence. But like various cities in our nation's history, Kuhlman's life and ministry has fallen on hard times through scholarly neglect. In recognizing Kuhlman's outsized influence on charismatic Christianity, Artman's work is itself a form of gentrification as the “Miracle Lady” is restored to a central place in the story of American religion.