clude inventio (development), dispositio (organization), elecutio
(style), memoria (memory), and pronunciatio (delivery) (see also
Golden, Berquist, and Coleman 1989, 13). In most cases, I have con-
sciously chosen not to use these terms as center headings in each
chapter to avoid a formulaic, cookie-cutter approach. In spite of this,
many chapters wound up looking similar anyway. In most chapters,
after providing some background on each faith healer, I discussed the
nature of their audiences. Then I focused on their lines of argument
(i.e. inventio or development), after which I discussed their style and
delivery. In between I made mention of how organized their sermons
were.

As long as people continue to become ill or to be born with phys-
ical and emotional maladies and as long as individuals like those cov-
ered in this book proclaim miraculous deliverance from such ailments,
I believe books like this one need to be written. While I do not claim
to have the answer to every question involving faith and healing, I
believe some answers are too obvious to be overlooked. A close anal-
ysis of the discourse of healing revivalists is a fruitful starting point
in trying to understand how they induce cooperation in their hearers
and why faith healing has been so attractive throughout the twentieth
century.

There is a second reason I believe this study is important. If I am
successful in establishing the rhetorical parameters of faith healers,
not only should this book help us to become better consumers of
faith healing discourse, but it will also help to delineate this genre
from other forms of Pentecostal or charismatic preaching as well as
from fundamentalists' rhetoric in general. While there may be a num-
ber of similarities between these groups, I believe that faith healing
is its own genre and should not be confused with either fundamen-
talists' rhetoric or the rhetoric of other Pentecostal groups such as
snake handlers or contemporary Pentecostal televangelists who don't
practice healings per se. These rhetorics, while perhaps close, are not
necessarily the same.

I have often thought that the words of hostile witnesses who ac-
cused the apostle Peter of being a disciple of Christ on the night of
Christ's betrayal as recorded in Matthew 26:73 are appropriate to
describe twentieth-century American faith healers--"for thy speech

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