The Billy Graham Center is the largest building on the campus of Wheaton College, an evangelical liberal arts college located in the Chicago suburb where this Ruth Graham spent her first 22 years. When I enrolled in the college, my wheaton.edu e-mail address received occasional misdirected missives for another Ruth Graham, who as the wife of Billy Graham can fairly be considered the first lady of American evangelicalism.

One message thanked me for my work on a 1950 crusade.

I moved to New York City after graduating in 2002 and was rarely asked about this other Ruth Graham. That is, until Mr. Graham came to town last summer for what was billed as his final crusade. The three-day preaching campaign, which echoed his 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden, attracted an estimated 230,000 people to the former World’s Fair grounds in Queens. (It also attracted a few more e-mails to my in-box.)

Now, the questions are likely to start up again.Last night, Billy and Ruth Graham’s daughter, Ruth Graham, arrived in New York to headline “Ruth Graham and Friends,” a two-day conference that will take place at Calvary Baptist Church on West 57th Street. The stated mission of the new organization is to “get real answers to real issues with real hope from a real God.” Translated, all that reality means a focus on a certain kind of domestic topic that Ms. Graham calls the issues of “our secular world.”

There will be sessions on depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, pornography, and divorce. Actress Anne Heche’s mother, Nancy Heche, will lead a session titled “What to Say When the Unthinkable Happens” — “the unthinkable” being finding out a family member is gay.

Ms. Graham is seeking smaller audiences than her father’s. “This really is an eyeball-to-eyeball ministry. Stadiums are not my goal,” Ms. Graham said Wednesday from her home in Virginia. “I’m a unique Graham.” The executive director of Ruth Graham and Friends, Texas Reardon, said about 300 people pre-registered for the conference, and that he expected between 50 and 100 more to sign up by the time the first session begins today.

New York is the fifth stop on the tour, and Mr. Reardon said the numbers here are in line with the past four conferences. The high so far has been a turnout of 550 in Wichita, Kan. He said most attendees will come from the five boroughs, concentrated in Manhattan, though the registration list also draws from New Jersey and Connecticut.

Each attendee who pays the $59 registration fee ($105 for couples) attends performances and talks by Naomi Judd and Kathie Lee Gifford, three keynote speeches, and two of the smaller topical sessions.

Ms. Graham will speak on “The Struggle of Forgiveness,” and, to hear her tell it, she has had a lot to forgive. She is twice divorced, and her three children have two teenage pregnancies and a drug addiction between them. Although Ms. Graham’s four siblings are all involved in some form of Christian ministry, she said she is specially suited to speaking about pain and healing.”I have a unique voice in my family, having gone through this,”she said.”I’m not a preacher and not a teacher. I’m a sharer.”

Mr. Reardon said planning for the tour began a year ago, but Ms. Graham sees its origins reaching back about 10 years. “It began a long time ago when I went through my own path of dealing with difficulties in my own life,” she said. “I was sitting with a broken heart in the pew.” (She is the author of the 2004 book “In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart.”)

Ms. Graham, who is not an ordained minister, said it is not her goal to become the next “America’s pastor,” which her father has been called for his work with every president since Eisenhower. “God’s going to have to raise that person up,” she said. Although her mother is severely ill and bed-ridden, she reported that her father, 87, is in excellent health. Ms. Graham is not involved in politics — “I have opinions, but they’re my own opinions” — but she has encouraged her father to speak publicly. “He keeps up with everything, watches the news shows. … I tell him, ‘Daddy, don’t hide, people want to hear from you.’ They want to hear from a grandfatherly figure to seek reassurance.”

She will speak publicly in her own motherly way this weekend, to a few hundred people in a pocket of evangelicalism in Manhattan. She will attend Sunday services at the church, and then it’s on to the next engagement in Key Largo, Fla.

In the meantime, I think this town is big enough for the both of us.