Healing Hands

Two enormous bronze hands, palms together, rise above the entrance gardens of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Officially named Healing Hands, they are better known as the Praying Hands, and TravelOK, Oklahoma's tourism site, bills them as the world's largest praying hands and the largest bronze sculpture in the world, at 60 feet tall and 30 tons.

The sculptor was Leonard McMurry, an Oklahoma artist whose Healing Hands the Oklahoma Historical Society's encyclopedia lists among his works. Evangelist Oral Roberts commissioned it for the City of Faith medical complex, a medical complex Isgrigg describes as combining medicine and healing prayer. According to TravelOK, the hands were cast in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1980 and stood in front of the CityPlex Towers until 1991. A 2014 profile in 405 Magazine says a Mexican foundry made the pieces, a convoy of trucks brought them to Tulsa, and a ten-person crew spent three months assembling and welding them; it gives the weight as about 60,000 pounds and the fingers as about 20 feet long.