Julie Lyons

The year was 2001. The United States had just started bombing Afghanistan post-9/11. Hardly anyone was traveling internationally for fun, but I found myself in a small, urban church in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, lit that October night by a single dangling bulb. I was there with members of my Dallas...

If you aren't familiar with Bishop T.D. Jakes, it could only mean you're white or, like much of the entertainment industry and American media, generally clueless about the lives of this country's tens of millions of evangelical Christians. To black Americans, Jakes is an icon -- a preaching, teaching, entrepreneurial...