peggy fletcher stack excommunicated11 Mar peggy fletcher stack excommunicated
It went back to his college years. I asked Quinn this past summer if he thought the provocations he penned as a historian might have been fueled on some level by his own inner conflict with Mormon teachingsif perhaps, unconsciously, he wanted to force a showdown with church authorities. Wearing a bathrobe, he answered after several rings and found three men in suits and ties on his doorstep. He turned 65 two years later, making him eligible for Social Security and Medicare. (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was excommunicated in 1993 as part of the so-called September Six, has had her request for rebaptism into the LDS Church rejected by the faith's governing First Presidency after being approved by her local lay leaders. He had also just published an article titled The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844, which detailed the confusion about who should succeed Joseph Smith after his assassination. It was held by the stake high council, and so my bishop and ward members took the position that that was their doing. She talks very vaguely when it comes to personal, specific spiritual beliefs and whether they align with doctrine, but she doesn't hesitate to call the church out on its shit at all. When interviewing Quinn in 76, Packer said, I have a hard time with historians, because they idolize the truth. "The issues in Mormon doctrine, history and practice highlighted by those facing church discipline are much larger than any one individual," the statement reads. They had the responsibility to preserve the doctrinal purity of the church, they said, adding that, because Mormon leaders are constrained by confidentiality rules, the media have relied on information supplied by those disciplined or by their sympathizers. Similar councils occurred more sporadically over the next few years. In 1981, Quinn was asked by the colleges chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, a national honor society for history students, to respond to The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect. He did not pull his punches. He stinks.. By Peggy Fletcher Stack After an exhausting six-hour disciplinary hearing Sunday, Mormon leaders temporarily suspended Grant H. Palmer's membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the time, he was grieving the death of his son, who had gone missing and was found weeks later hanging from a tree by an extension cord. She was the editor of Hastings Center Report from 1986 until 1991, when she was hired to start the "Faith" column in the Salt Lake Tribune. Ill come get him. Quinn, who later assisted the police in their investigation, did not go home for several days. During Quinns college years, BYUs president, Ernest Wilkinson, organized a student spy ring intended to catch out professors with communist leanings. The Salt Lake Tribune . We appreciate the search for knowledge and the discussion of gospel subjects, the First Presidency said. West said hed been told by a higher authority to take further action to remedy the situation, Quinn says. Then I went away to my cabin for the summer and he called all the temples in Utah, saying he was canceling my recommend. In his Yale dissertation, Quinn examined the highest leadership of the LDS church as a social elite, focusing on the extensive family ties within the hierarchy, the considerable wealth of Mormon authorities, and their long-standing involvement in politics. I had never been treated as a liar before. Bad marriages had women running to and away from . It was, Quinn told me, an awful, awful year., When he had recovered enough to write, Quinn finished the sequel to The Mormon Hierarchy and revised Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview. At least, that's how Hall sees it. 2) I would very gladly swap my OSF compensation package with any member of the LDS First Presidency, Quorum of the 12 Apostles, or 1st Quorum of the Seventy. What's it like going to church for two decades as an excommunicated member? During the hiring process, a college dean offered to protect him, Quinn says, from those peoplethe LDS leadersup in Salt Lake., Before he could be hired, though, he had to visit LDS headquarters at 47 East South Temple in downtown Salt Lake and sit for an interview with one of those peoplespecifically, a general authority, one of the 100 or so men who run the church. He acknowledged to me that, of course, it is possible to find outlets for service outside of Mormonism. This new knowledge sent Quinn to the Journal of Discourses, a 26-volume collection of Mormon sermons. He went to stay instead with an old college friend, Richard Lambert. Whats more, all Mormons are supposed to have a calling in the church, which makes for a wonderfully participatory religion but also discourages casual membership. I love the gospel. In the spring, he had published LDS Authority and New Plural Marriages, 18901904, the culmination of his interest in post-1890 polygamy, first prompted a quarter-century before by Family Kingdom. Mormon higher-ups hold keys to excommunication process against two activists. Last month, for instance, the Daily Beast reported that a blogger named David Twede was facing excommunication because of critical pieces he had written about Mitt Romney. [4], She won the 2004 Cornell Award for 'Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers' from the Religion Newswriters Association in 2004, an award she also received in 2012, 2017, and 2018. The fact that we keep going to church is a blessing. Men only become gay in prison, or sometimes in the Navy. Grant, an LDS Church president, a granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah, Wallace F. Bennett, and a granddaughter of American physicist Harvey Fletcher. Peggy Fletcher Fletcher (Peggy Bennett Fletcher) See Photos. What do you think about these potential actions against Kate Kelly and John Dehlin? I always felt that I had Gods sanction and encouragement, so I went ahead following that path. Even early on, a fellow Mormon historian started telling Quinn he must have a death wish regarding his membership in the church. Peggy Fletcher Stack writes for the Salt Lake Tribune. July 26, 2012 12:03 pm . When the men from the stake presidency came to his door in February, Quinn was living three blocks from the Salt Lake Temple and the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The symposium's "Pillars of My Faith" session will showcase a similar path, said Mary Ellen Robertson, Sunstone's interim executive director. He decided that only 16 of the changes were significant. This massive housecleaning may be one of the church's largest since the 1850s, when thousands were excommunicated for everything from poor hygiene . My guess is she has to be to keep the doors open so people willing to talk to her. No way. Lavina Fielding Anderson may have been excommunicated from the LDS Church for apostasy more than 20 years ago, but don't think for a minute that this Utah writer is now an outsider to her faith. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. ", Kelly writes in London's Guardian newspaper "For me it is because of my faith and not in spite of it that I have a desire to stand up for myself and my sisters. They are called to them by the men at the very top of the hierarchy. I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land, it says. The [women's] Relief Society president found a way to involve me as a "permanent substitute" for Relief Society pianist. Hi, Peggy. Disciplinary councils still happen, though they appear to be less frequent, particularly when it comes to apostasy. She won the Cornell Award for Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers from the Religious News Association in 2004, 2012, 2017, 2018, and 2022. It did not happen overnight, but many LDS leaders seemed to regret the furor and the hurt that surrounded those excommunications. The day before, a similar bomb had killed Steve Christensen, a friend and Mormon history enthusiast who had arranged for Quinn to speak at lunch and dinner engagements, paying him with generous gift cards to his fathers clothing store. Hankswhose nephew Paul would show up on Quinns doorstep in 1993was himself a general authority, and he had overseen the two-year Mormon mission Quinn served in England after his freshman year at BYU. Now I see that he just didn't appreciate the dishonesty associated with his grandpa. Groundbreaking Emma Smith biographer, a 'giant' in Mormon scholarship, dies at 82. Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example, published in 1996, argues that same-sex intimacy was much more accepted by early Mormonsincluding Joseph Smiththan it is today. Woodruff himself said in his journal that he was acting for the temporal salvation of the church, and the 1890 Manifestoas his official statement is knownwas not immediately taken to be a divine revelation. Peggy Fletcher. The church reports a worldwide membership of 16 million. All rights reserved. . Even after that, a few high-ranking Mormons continued to authorize such marriages. Which has also, it seems, made Michael Quinns singular focus on the unspoken parts of the Mormon past less relevant to younger historians, who operate with more freedom and less pressureand who draw far more interest than their predecessors from the wider world, which has suddenly become fascinated by Mormonism. And he was the most strident of the group when it came to denouncing internal critics of Mormon leaders and teachings. He said it was apostasy because I believed that general authorities had done something wrong. She embodies, more than anyone else I know, the ideal of a broken heart and contrite spirit, which has influenced me so strongly that I, the last time I checked, was one of only two of the 21 children of the September Six who is still an active member.. In 1961, when Michael Quinn was a devout Mormon of 17, his best friends girlfriend gave him a copy of Family Kingdom, a biography of the one-time apostle John W. Taylor. Hanks became conciliatory, reading On Being a Mormon Historian, and writing to say hed gotten from it deeper insight into your devotion and your dedication to history and the Church. He asked again to meet when Quinn came back to Utah. Anderson was photographed at her Salt Lake City home with the work of her late husband, Paul L. Anderson, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019. Peggy Fletcher Stack has been reporting on faith and religion since 1991. ``It was like `We're here to support you, Brother Gileadi,' '' he said of the atmosphere at the . (Peggy Fletcher Stack writes for The Salt Lake Tribune.) Quinn was already on the alert for such wrinkles in the churchs history. Hanks was excommunicated in 1993, one of the "September Six," Mormon writers and scholars who were disciplined by their local LDS officials in the same month. But multiple faculty members argued that, in the words of one professor, Mike was not the right person to head up any kind of Mormon history or Mormonstudies program given the fact hes very publicly excommunicated. Hofmann eventually became, in the words of one expert, the most skilled forger this country has ever seen. For LDS leaders nervous about church history, he was a nightmare personified: a lying, murderous man hell-bent on embarrassing the religion while glorifying and enriching himself. [5] They moved to Utah in 1991 when she was hired to be the religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune, where much of her reporting has focused on the LDS Church. [5], The Stacks traveled in Africa for a year,[5] then settled in New York City for five years,[1] where she worked as the editor of the Hastings Center Report while her husband attended film school. Following his excommunication, he finished The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power and turned his attention to another scholarly book with deep personal meaning. Then he made copies of his letter and Hanks letter and dropped them off at the offices of Vern Anderson and Peggy Fletcher Stack, a former Sunstone editor who had become a religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. A diligent historian, meanwhile, will come to see that the truth of the matter is complicated. [5][8] During her time with the magazine, she helped turn around its finances, saving it from closing. I said I didn't think members believe general authorities don't make mistakes. While Packers precise involvement remains a matter of dispute, what little is known hints at his interference. Where a skeptic sees convenience, a believer may see Gods hand. That, in any case, was his thinking. I had a spiritual prompting that summer staying at my cabin that I wasn't to go. He hopes that eventually hell manage to sell the condo and will get enough money for it that he could move back to New Orleans and live there for the last couple decades, God willing, of his life. The biggest thing that got me was the excommunication of bill reel segment of the Mormon stories podcast. The essay, Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843, cites writings by Joseph Smith and other early church documents to argue that women already possess much of the spiritual authority granted to men, and that todays LDS leaders simply fail to recognize this. Religion Two decades after she was "exed," Utah writer still attends her LDS ward. There he told a story about the time Packer embarrassed him in front of fellow church leaders as apparent payback for a slight from six years before. The former LDS stake president, who oversaw a group of congregations in Tooele for eight years and worked as an architect on her faith's most sacred spaces, faced, in her mind, an . There have always been dissidents in the Mormon ranksthe religion itself is one particularly dramatic dissent from the rest of Christian traditionbut a new community of Mormon intellectuals had coalesced in the 1960s and 70s. Why didn't you go to the hearing to defend yourself? Ultimately, the events of September 1993 may have helped broaden those borderlands, encouraging other members of the faith to openly question Mormon orthodoxy without entirely leaving the religion behind. The church keeps fairly careful records of its membership, for one thing, records that play a part in the worldwide effort to bring salvation to all of Gods children. Dallin Oaks speaking at the General Conference in April 1989. For details, go to http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium. At the conference, he spoke about the history of same-sex relationships in the church and the shifting attitudes toward them on the part of Mormon leaders. Or a great one, if possible: Since childhood, Quinn had been told by his grandmother that someday he would be an apostle of the church. Excommunication is a complicated and multi-layered process for sexual minorities in the church who choose to marry in a way that the church considers a "same sex" marriage. [14] Along with five other reporters, she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 in the Local Reporting category for a series of stories about sexual assault victims at BYU. Half of these men speak for the accused, and half for the church. He also mentioned reading Quinns long Dialogue article about the politics of Ezra Taft Benson. In the field of Mormon history the changes are particularly pronounced. [5] She then received a fellowship to work in the Church History Division of the LDS Church (then run by Leonard J. June 19, 2014 ; 1 of 9; I might have lost my soul, but at least I still have my mind. The book he was finishing, which would be published in 1994, was called The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power. This was hard on Paul [who works at Brigham Young University]. sltrib.com. When his mother died in 2007, she left him the condo. or. Using the familiar Christian metaphor of a lost sheep who listens for the one voice that can guide it back home, Oaks said Mormons should beware of alternate voices whose avowed or secret object is to deceive and devour the flock. Among the voices Oaks warned about were the ones heard in magazines, journals, and newspapers and at lectures, symposia, and conferences. At the same General Conference, another apostle said that a true stalwart of the church would not lend his or her good name to periodicals, programs, or forums that feature offenders who do sow discord among brethren. , When the Sunstone Symposium next convened, in the summer of 92, Lavina Fielding Anderson presented a paper on this growing conflict between leaders and intellectuals. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. The Salt Lake Tribune/June 16, 2014. Believers in Denver Snuffer's Remnant movement gather in a Sandy, Utah, home for a fellowship meeting on Aug. 13, 2017, to sing songs and partake of the sacrament. Peggy Fletcher Stack is the religion columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, and one of the founders of Sunstone. [9] She started the "Faith" column after a discussion with Tribune editor Jay Shelledy. They never gave me one reason. Especially considering that in a lot of cases she's the one doing the exposing My guess is she's a let's-reform-this-baby-from-within progressive. Most people don't know I've been excommunicated. A former BYU professor named David Wright was excommunicated in 1994 after publishing a paper arguing that the Book of Mormon was not an ancient text. Find your friends on Facebook. When something like [my excommunication] blows up, the first casualty is trust and that never comes back. A second bomb that first day killed Kathy Sheets, the wife of one of Christensens former business partners. One of the articles came from an anthology called Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, edited by Maxine Hanks, a distant relative of Pauland his uncle Marionand, soon, one of the September Six herself. The four-day symposium, which begins Wednesday evening, also will include dozens of sessions about Mormonism and politics, about how members grapple with contemporary issues such as gay rights and feminism, building online LDS communities, Mormon Latino views of the church's immigration stance and how the Utah-based faith has developed its "brand" in the past several decades. I cannot be anything but a Mormon. Still, he sought out the scriptures first edition himself, and did his own comparison. He later got married in the temple, while I sat outside with friends. If there is unfinished business, its the First Presidencys, not mine.. As Quinn writes, the Manifesto inherited ambiguity, was created in ambiguity, and produced ambiguity.. But the Churchs case against Twede will never be known: After the Daily Beast story, the council was postponed, and a few weeks later, Twede resigned from the faith. With no regular income to speak of, Quinn moved into his mothers condo in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. The most senior apostle, Howard W. Hunter, also suffered from serious health problems. The suit was settled out of court and a process for voluntary withdrawal was established in 1989.). He had become a father figure of sorts, even officiating at Quinns marriage ceremony. Hebrew scholar Avraham Gileadi has been rebaptized into the LDS Church after being excommunicated for apostasy along with five other writers and scholars in September 1993. I was not surprised or angry about the outcome, Anderson said Wednesday, and she has no plans to try to open that door again. I wrote an article for "Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought" that summarized 133 cases of LDS ecclesiastical abuse, and my pleas to do better to care for the Mormon faithful. The stake president, a man named Paul Hanks, tried to step into the apartment as he said hello, Quinn recalls. There would be quite a number of people in the Mormon community who would look unfavorably on that. Later that year, Quinn was recommended for a one-year appointment at Arizona State. [5], In 1975, following discussions with Scott Kenney and others, she helped found Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon studies. (Quinn is known professionally as D. Michael Quinn; the first name on his birth certificate is Dennis.) In the early 90s, when he was living in New Orleans, Quinn, nearing his 50th birthday, tried his hand at fiction, going back to the literature he once studied as an undergraduate. Today, its Nelson, with a new counselor, Oaks, instead of Dieter F. Uchtdorf. After it was published, Hugh West, the president of his stake in Salt Lake CityQuinn never moved to Provo, finding the hourlong commute worth it to live in Utahs one metropolisasked to see him. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. When they did, Quinn, an only child, would go to his room, put on a classical record, and turn the volume up. Peggy Fletcher Stack / Salt Lake Tribune: High-ranking Mormon official, who twice spoke in General Conference, is excommunicated Check out Mini-memeorandum for simple mobiles or memeorandum Mobile for modern smartphones. If her reentry had been approved, Anderson would have been the third of the six the other five are Avraham Gileadi, Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano and Maxine Hanks to be welcomed back into full fellowship with the Utah-based faith. Hanks was accused of apostasy for editing an anthology, Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, which included a discussion of the all-male priesthood and womens relationship to it. Excommunication opened the door to a larger cosmos, inside and outside myself.". There, he tried other kinds of writing, thinking maybe hed put Mormon history behind him. Today, LDS leaders seem more inclined to recognize, said Wotherspoon, now host of the "Mormon Matters" podcast, "that Zion is made up of people of all types. Hanks return predated the Ordain Women movement, which pushed for women to join the faiths priesthood, said Latter-day Saint scholar Matthew Bowman, who heads the Mormon studies program at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California. Packer, the second-most senior among the 12, was the substitute president of the Quorum of the Twelve whenever Hunter was sidelined for medical reasons. It will be published next year. I prayed every article I wrote into print, he said, continually asking God what he should do. They don't feel safe enough to keep going it's such a terrible, terrible loss. He didn't seem to know what footnotes are so he thought I made the whole thing up. He was excommunicated in 1911. According the her Wikipedia page: She is a great-granddaughter of Heber J. SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) After years of tension between Mormons and gay rights activists -- with political action and theological pronouncements on one . [5][6], Fletcher initially attended Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, for a year,[1] then transferred to the University of Utah, where she earned a BA in English literature. Quinn told friends that he did not want anyone to lobby on his behalf. In 1975 Stack helped found Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon studies, and steered it for its first eleven years. For the faithful, the simplest narrative regarding LDS polygamy is that God wanted Mormons to practice it between 1843when He revealed the doctrine of plural marriage to Joseph Smithand 1890, when He informed one of Smiths successors, Wilford Woodruff, of a change in course. http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium. I love Jesus. She declined. In 1989, Dallin H. Oaks, the onetime law professor and BYU president who was now an apostle, had given a talk called Alternate Voices at the churchs semiannual General Conference.
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