But the cause didn't really matter because it was pretty clear that Elder [Boyd K.] Packer [of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles] was trying to send a message by targeting certain people, such as historians and feminists. [4] During her time there, she has met and interviewed the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Gordon B. Hinckley, among others. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. . Bradley and Hanks are friends who trod a lot of common ground, Robertson said. After organizing a massive campaign to pass Proposition 8 and make gay marriage illegal in California, for instance, the church suffered a massive backlash and has since appeared more tolerant toward gay rights activism. [3] She is a great-granddaughter of Heber J. The timing of his career, which once appeared serendipitous, now seems almost cruel. The Salt Lake Tribune's Peggy Fletcher Stack, a . On Oct. 16, 1985, Quinn was having a late lunch at a BYU food court when he heard a news report that Mark Hofmann had been blown up by a pipe bomb in Salt Lake City. On Friday , during a popular evening session of next week's Sunstone Symposium, an annual meeting for Mormon intellectuals and observers, Hanks will detail her 20-year spiritual sojourn as a feminist theologian and chaplain, which brought her full circle back into Mormonism. She said she was really angry at the church, not at me. 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. TV and newspaper reporters came. Mormon higher-ups hold keys to excommunication process against two Later he was told that despite his request that no one speak for him, a friend had attended and done just that, playing recordings of Quinns presentations at past Sunstone Symposia and reading excerpts from his writings. By then an assistant district attorney, Lambert later helped prosecute the case against Hofmann. In 2001, a long-standing effort called the Joseph Smith Papers Project received additional funding and became a major draw to those who wished to study the early days of the church. Many religions have strictures that establish who is in and who is out, but the Mormon church draws a brighter line than most. Peggy Fletcher Stack - The Salt Lake Tribune I love the church. But 90 percent of the ward has changed since my court. No way. Whitesides says that Connie Chungs people asked her to take a hidden camera into her court. Most people don't know I've been excommunicated. And the Tribune is changing with it. The book opened Quinns teenage eyes to dissent within the highest echelons of LDS leadership, and to the apostles debateand apparent dissemblingabout plural marriage after 1890. How did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grow so fast Not long before Hofmann sold that forged document, he approached Quinn in the church archives, and asked about the succession crisis and the article. Kelly was excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in June. 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. Disciplinary councils still happen, though they appear to be less frequent, particularly when it comes to apostasy. Maybe, I suggested, he was trying to bring his full self out into the open. Hired in 1991 to cover Utah's various faiths, particularly Mormonism, Peggy has talked forgiveness with Archbishop Desmond Tutu . 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. He insisted that the September councils were local affairs, but church employees who reported to him had, it turned out, been keeping tabs on the six who were disciplined, and rumors swirled that Packer himself personally insisted that the courts take place. They can't ex someone with that king of lineage. [Husband] Paul, Christian [their son] and I sang in the choir that day. 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. Supposedly Nelson, like Benson, was a supporter of the John Birch Society, a radically right-wing, conspiracy-mongering, anti-Communist group. By Peggy Fletcher Stack June 23, 2015 Many Mormon feminists experienced Kate Kelly's excommunication as a harsh slap felt around the world. Robert Kirby does this also, but much more indirectly. Even in the novels, he noticed, the gay characters came to terrible ends. The bearded dad, a father of 11 who was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2015 for apostasy, suggests they sing hymns . When Hanks showed up on Quinns doorstep in Salt Lake City that February, he brought a letter citing two of Quinns articles and a statement Quinn made to a reporter in 1991 as evidence that he was an apostate. Truth is, she has never stopped attending her Mormon ward. KRE/AMB END STACK See Photos. In October, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that a threatening phone call had been made to the home of a local man named Michael D. Quinn. She currently serves on the . The nature of religion reporting in Utah is changing. After Quinn finished his lunch at BYU, he decided not to go home. In 1981, he gave an address to church educators called The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect, which was organized around four cautions. The second of them is this: There is a temptation for the writer or teacher of church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith-promoting or not. 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. She's been covering religion for the paper since 1991 taking on a variety of topics, but mostly the LDS Church. 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. He himself did not even stay in town. Independent publicationsmost notably Dialogue (founded in 1966) and Sunstone (1974)provided forums for scholarship and reflection about Mormon history and theology. JDK-8141210 : Very slow loading of JavaScript file with recent JDK Nowadays, anyone can Google Mormon polygamy and learn more than theyd ever need to know about that practice, about its abandonment, the subsequent fallout, and so on. In it, Harris, who paid for the first printing of the Book of Mormon, tells a story of that books origins strikingly different from Smiths later, official account. 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. [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. 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. 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. Peggy Fletcher Stack: How I report on Utah's changing faith landscape Today, its Nelson, with a new counselor, Oaks, instead of Dieter F. Uchtdorf. McLean invited her, she said, to describe her faith in a letter, which includes her conviction that God cherishes everyone. With no regular income to speak of, Quinn moved into his mothers condo in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. Wilkinson was reprimanded, though, and in 1970 he was replaced by Dallin H. Oaks, a law professor at the University of Chicago who had clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren at the U.S. Supreme Court. Since then, only one Avraham Gileadi, an Old Testament scholar who has spent his life researching and writing about the biblical oracle Isaiah's prophecies about our time has been rebaptized into the faith. 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. There was no process for voluntary withdrawal from the Mormon Church in the 1960s, so each of these kids had to be excommunicatedtechnically, for apostasy. We had a family devotional every night with prayer, singing and scripture reading. She was upset that he was not attending church, and so he drove 45 minutes to a singles ward, a Mormon congregation specifically for unmarried adults, near UCLA. 9:30AM EDT 8/29/2017 Peggy Fletcher Stack/RNS. The same month that his essay about post-Manifesto polygamy was published, in April 1985, Quinn and his wife separated. She is in the right family. . He slept on her futon and had no Internet access or health insurance. My guess is she has to be to keep the doors open so people willing to talk to her. 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. By declining to talk with any priesthood leaders, he wrote, you are cutting yourself off from the blessings of the Temple and the blessings of the priesthood. He insinuated that the churchs problems with Quinn were not all theological. 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. The term "September Six" was coined by The Salt Lake Tribune and was used in the media and subsequent discussion. [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] The [women's] Relief Society president found a way to involve me as a "permanent substitute" for Relief Society pianist. He left quietly and went to call the LDS Church Office Building to ask about this committee. (They draw numbers to pick sides.) According the her Wikipedia page: She is a great-granddaughter of Heber J. Quinn wrote back more harshly this time, listing all the things Hanks had done that troubled him. The church has control of my membership; I decide whether I'm Mormon or not. Anderson was photographed at her Salt Lake City home with the work of her late husband, Paul L. Anderson, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019. Hi, Peggy. Quinn went over local church rolls and found addresses of kids who didnt come to Sunday services. It was already, in the minds of some, a dangerous pursuit, and it had now become a deadly one, marred by fraud and riddled with errors. Caffeinated Version: 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. However, I do not see that eternal equality reflected in the contemporary church.". Most memorably, Harris says that the spirit who appeared to Smith and directed him to the golden platesfrom which Smith claimed to have translated Mormonisms founding scriptureappeared as a white salamander and struck Smith three times. By Peggy Fletcher Stack and David Noyce Sep. 7, 2022 What this sociologist (Darron Smith) and Peggy Fletcher Stack fail to recognize is that Mormon racism isn't in the past, it's in the present. My stake president said in an email, if I [didn't] come forward and tell people that I am not a member in good standing, he would. This is all lies! he told the friend who showed it to him. 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. was pressured to resign from Brigham Young University and subsequently excommunicated from the faith in 1993 as part of the famed "September Six . How have the members of your ward treated you? She and five other journalists at the Salt Lake Tribune won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.She won the Cornell Award for Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers from the Religious News Association in 2004, 2012, 2017 . She was told to pass along this message: Im tired of hearing him criticize the church. This friend, Quinn says, told him that the men on the council disagreed about whether Quinn was an apostate, and that President Hanks finally declared that Boyd K. Packer was pressing him to take action, and they needed to do something. Some, perhaps, simply regretted the bad press. Something similar, if more protracted, took place after September 1993. He revised the story occasionally over the next decade, submitting it unsuccessfully to the Paris Review and the Atlantic. 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. He compared Packers treatment of Church leaders to the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, which is anathema to Mormons. We embedded him as thoroughly in the church as we ourselves had been. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. "All they asked me about was my relationship to Jesus Christ. He contends that a former director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had openly romantic feelings for men, and highlights a once hushed-up gay affair from the 1940s between a prominent church leader and a 21-year-old Mormon serving in the Navy. ", Hanks is a "genuinely spiritual person and quite insightful, who brings a type of spirituality with her that will resonate with lots of people," he said. P The Sunstone Symposium runs July 25-28 at the University of Utah's Olpin Student Union. But it was a forgery. Peggy Fletcher Stack was born and raised in New Jersey; studied at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; traveled through Africa for two years with her news-photographer husband; and worked at Books and Religion in Manhattan before settling down as a religion writer at The Salt Lake Tribune. [5] She then attended the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California for two years, where she studied religious history. I didn't have to look at the councilmen and wonder what they said about me. I did the very best I knew how to do, the thing that I felt was the right thing to do., Donate to the newsroom now. Neither Paul nor I nor Christian had to field a single negative comment the next week, when we went to church in our ward. I did. Though the letter from the current First Presidency made up of church President Russell M. Nelson and counselors Dallin H. Oaks and Henry B. Eyring offered no explanation for the rejection, Bowman speculates that there may be at least two possible answers history and dissent. Stack is an advisor on religion to the Public Broadcasting Service,[2] and has written two books. Quinn argued against excommunication, he told me, but he did not have the final say. Anderson wrote another piece that was again picked up by multiple papers, including the Los Angeles Times, which ran it under the headline Mormons Investigating Him, Critic Says.. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. She has sat quietly in the same pew as the emblems of the sacrament, or communion, have passed by her more than 1,200 times without being able to partake. Vern Anderson, the AP reporter, wrote an 800-word story about the essay in January, just before Hanks showed up at Quinns apartment. Quinn was so depressed by the experience that for a few weeks he lost his belief in God completely. Though he maintained a solemn belief in the Mormon gospel and in the sacrament partaken of by the faithful at Sunday services, he stopped attending church altogether. Peggy Fletcher Stack, David Noyce 3/23/2022. "Nobody asked me to disavow my book or stop writing," Hanks said. In order to have her blessings fully restored, she had to meet with a general authority at church headquarters.
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