American Priestess

During Chicago's turbulent 1870s, Anna and Horatio Spafford, suffering personal and financial losses, broke from their evangelical colleagues to preach the need to return to Christianity's apostolic beginnings. When Anna began receiving messages from God urging her to go to Jerusalem, members of their enthralled congregation followed them to Palestine. In multicultural Jerusalem, the ecumenical Overcomers befriended Muslims, Jews, and Greeks alike, yet were determined that Jews be returned to their ancestral land. Their efforts were dogged by controversy, and two consular representatives of the United States accused them of deviant behavior and sexual license. Singularly charismatic, Anna ignored her critics and quashed all dissent, preaching a strange form of sexual abstinence, abolishing marriage, and declaring the established Church iniquitous. Her benevolent dictatorship survives today as the famous American Colony Hotel, a historic favorite of visitors to Jerusalem. Written with flair and insight, AMERICAN PRIESTESS is at once a portrait of Jerusalem from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to the founding of Israel and a fascinating exploration of the birth of the evangelical movement in America.