I recently wrote a piece for The Huffington Post featuring an insider’s look at whether faith healing by one of the country’s biggest tent revivalists delivered or deceived:

They wanted to know if the miracles were real. They asked about the preacher’s affairs. About the money he made. They asked if Donna Johnson, the woman who considered the preacher her stepdad, had forgiven him. But what they really wanted to know, they asked only after that polite number of other questions. Had Donna ever seen a miracle that she believed was real?

David Terrell was once one of the country’s most famous tent revivalists. During the 1970s thousands of his followers sold their possessions and relocated to encampments across the South and Midwest because he’d told them that the world was about to end. Donna Johnson’s mother was his pianist, the woman who left her two oldest children with various church members while she followed him about the country. She bore him three children while believing that someday he would divorce his wife and marry her. He never did.

Donna is the oldest of her mother’s children. Her new memoir, Holy Ghost Girl, has just come out in paperback.

Read the full piece here.