Hanks worked for the Church Educational System, where Packer had long been an administrator, and Quinn heard that Loren C. Dunn, a friend of Packers and fellow general authority, had spoken to Hanks personally. Ill come get him. Elder Packer, he told Quinn, will never get over this.. West did not formally revoke the recommend, he just put it in his drawer. 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. This year he completed the third and final volume in his trilogy on the Mormon hierarchy, which examines the churchs business and financial activities from 1830 to 2010. 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. 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. Just before his excommunication, in the spring of 1993, Quinn bore his testimony at the singles ward he was attending each week in Westwood, near UCLA. The modern Mormon church has become a fairly top-down organization, but most responsibility for attending to its members still resides in local lay leaders. She declined. A candlelight vigil was held outside the Salt Lake City meetinghouse where it took place. This was hard on Paul [who works at Brigham Young University]. Snuffer was excommunicated. See Photos. At its worst, such talk is sometimes called speaking evil of the Lords anointed.. Hanks became less diplomatic. They don't feel safe enough to keep going it's such a terrible, terrible loss. Quinn was shocked that it took that long. How did you find out about the impending disciplinary hearing? I know how to avoid people I didnt want to be in contact with, he says. The church has control of my membership; I decide whether I'm Mormon or not. (Peggy Fletcher Stack writes for The Salt Lake Tribune.) This other Quinn was not home when the call came, and a baby-sitter answered the phone. Years ago, Don Bradley, a longtime scholar of Mormon history, asked to have his name removed from LDS membership rolls when participation became uncomfortable. Excommunication opened the door to a larger cosmos, inside and outside myself.". Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. The fact that we keep going to church is a blessing. The intellectual climate had improved under Oaks, people said. [5], In 1975, following discussions with Scott Kenney and others, she helped found Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon studies. He looked in the card catalog under pervert, which was the word his grandmother had used after he told her that another kid at church had been groping him. From an early age, he felt within himself the presence of God, this burning of the spirit, as he says. He was housesitting. The churchs critics find the timing convenient: By 1890, the U.S. government had threatened to seize LDS property if polygamy wasnt renounced. 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. Mystery! disciplined Anderson and five other Mormon intellectuals, church disciplinary actions threatening Mormon feminist Kate Kelly and blogger John Dehlin. He slept on her futon and had no Internet access or health insurance. And it was not popular with those of the brethren that Quinn had already angered with his talk on Mormon history four years before. When interviewing Quinn in 76, Packer said, I have a hard time with historians, because they idolize the truth. If the blessing really happened, then Brigham Young, who led the early Mormons to Utah, might have been wrong to seize control of the church after Smiths murder. The entry for perversion said See homosexuality, and he read all the available books in that categorynot a lot in a small public library in 1956, though fairly heady stuff for a 12-year-old: Kinseys Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, some Freud, some Havelock Ellis. 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. I don't think I could have done that graciously. Not long after that, the bishop met with Anderson and asked her ever so gently if she would like to discuss reinstatement. My searching was complete. Quinn was already on the alert for such wrinkles in the churchs history. It had been a difficult year. http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium. The president in 2012, when Hanks was readmitted, was Thomas S. Monson. She and five other journalists at the Salt Lake Tribune won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. But he had a caring bishop that first year and decided on his own to serve a mission. 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. I heard she's not Mormon at all. But by the fall of 92 he had to return to Salt Lake City to finish research on the book, and he had grown tired of hiding from church authorities. I accuse that committee, England declared, of undermining our Church.. He was excommunicated in 1911. 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. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. Devout Mormons consider these callings divinely inspired. Once the kids were interested, the missionaries were supposed to contact their parents, with the aim of converting whole families. It went back to his college years. The Mormon intellectual community far and wide is mourning the loss of Linda King Newell. They were receptive. I admire her. At least, that's how Hall sees it. No telephone call came., On Aug. 27, McLean delivered the First Presidency denial. I did. [Husband] Paul, Christian [their son] and I sang in the choir that day. When he went into his office, the bishop, a man named Tom Andersen, said hed read this article in the L.A. Times, Quinn told me. Would love to hear your stories about her. 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. Still, he sought out the scriptures first edition himself, and did his own comparison. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. He, the bishop, and the other counselor held the necessary courts, excommunicating those who wanted out. (He took the surname from actor Anthony Quinn, whom he knew growing up in the Los Angeles barrio.) 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. Hanks had already held one church court in Quinns absence, in July, at which Quinn was disfellowshipped. 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. Right next to Pauls was Lavinas description of her beliefs in Jesus Christ, Mormon founder Joseph Smith, the scriptural text he produced, The Book of Mormon, and the role of prophets. A page of the so-called Salamander Letter, forged by Mark Hofmann. It struck him as an old missionarys trick. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. . "It will be a chance for a larger audience to hear this story," she said, and to hear how people can wrestle with their faith and then live it out. [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. Anderson was photographed at her Salt Lake City home on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019. I hate him. The charge stems from Palmer's 2002 book, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, which challenges the traditional explanations of the faith's founding . (Quinn is known professionally as D. Michael Quinn; the first name on his birth certificate is Dennis.) Michael Quinns final disciplinary council was held on Sept. 26, 1993, in the Salt Lake Stake Center, the headquarters for the oldest stake in Utah, founded by Brigham Young in 1847. Woodwards piece, headlined Apostles vs. Historians, called Quinns talk a stirring defense of intellectual integrity that had put Benson and Packer on the defensive. It was illustrated with a large photograph of Quinn up top, and a considerably smaller one of Packer. Packers notion that those writing church history should share only those things that are faith-promoting is not just intellectually offensive nowit has become quaint, the relic of a time when information was not so freely available. She said she was really angry at the church, not at me. A year later, David J. McLean, president of the Salt Lake Liberty Stake, reconvened a high council, a body that had excommunicated her 25 years and six months earlier for apostasy, Anderson wrote in a summary of her experience for a forthcoming volume of her essays, Mercy Without End: Toward a More Inclusive Church.. Hymns were sung. In 1975 Stack helped found Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon studies, and steered it for its first eleven years. In the first few days after the bombings, several people who had come into contact with Hofmann feared for their lives. She was struck by how frail he appeared, and found herself feeling nothing but compassion and love for a man who had once seemed like an enemy. I love the gospel. Mormon higher-ups hold keys to excommunication process against two activists. As she entered the building at 47 East South Temple, she happened to pass Boyd K. Packer on his way out. Fawn Brodie was related to David O. McKay. The institutional churchs position toward its intellectual community has shifted slowly and subtly but in real ways in the past 30 years; it is possible that there is a worry that allowing for her rebaptism would unearth battles the present First Presidency would like to let lie buried and spur a public relitigation of the issue., Secondly, the controversies surrounding Anderson had a great deal to do with feminism in the church and with ecclesiastical dissent, he said. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted. See Photos. Before the first court, Whitesides and Anderson alerted friends and the press, and word spread quickly. Quinn had spent three years in the military in the late 60s, working in counterintelligence. According the her Wikipedia page: She is a great-granddaughter of Heber J. 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. In a detailed confession, Hofmann said that he had secretly stopped believing in Mormonism as a teenager and had hatched a plan to embarrass the church by creating fake documents that exposed uncomfortable facts about early Mormon history. 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. 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. He froze. I prayed every article I wrote into print, he said, continually asking God what he should do. It was the papers second article in two weeks about a series of church courts held across 13 days in September and reported in media outlets across the country. McMurrin Differed in Gentler Times. He was in a wheelchair. 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. During Quinns college years, BYUs president, Ernest Wilkinson, organized a student spy ring intended to catch out professors with communist leanings. 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. While serving it in England, he was tasked with cleaning up the results of the Baseball Baptism Program, in which missionaries used sports to attract young converts. It's a way for me to participate and contribute, almost like having a calling. While such a calling does not officially confer infallibility on the man who receives itand the general authorities are all malepublicly criticizing the men in these positions is strongly discouraged. ", Kelly goes on KUER's Radio West "A lot of people are asking me why I came forward [with the news of my disciplinary hearing]. Quinns mother, on the other hand, was a sixth-generation Mormon: She had an ancestor who converted when the Mormons were still in Nauvoo, Ill., and who is mentioned in Joseph Smiths journals. Ordain Women's Kate Kelly loses last appeal; husband to resign from Mormon church . Quinn went over local church rolls and found addresses of kids who didnt come to Sunday services. That came out in early 1993. And he continued to correspond with Paul Hanks, who had written to express his displeasure at seeing his words quoted in the newspaper. June 17, 2014 8:59 pm . Most people don't know I've been excommunicated. He didn't seem to know what footnotes are so he thought I made the whole thing up. However, we believe that Latter-day Saints who are committed to the mission of their Church and the well-being of their fellow members will strive to be sensitive to those matters that are more appropriate for private conferring and correction than for public debate. There are times, they added, when public discussion of sacred or personal matters is inappropriate., The Statement on Symposia was another tear in the already fraying relationship between church leaders and scholars. Just go to . The biggest thing that got me was the excommunication of bill reel segment of the Mormon stories podcast. They didn't say anything. Resolved: Release in which this issue/RFE has been resolved. Oaks said Packer had met with Toscanos stake president, and acknowledged that this was a mistake. I cannot be anything but a Mormon. That's like solving obesity by turning MacDonald's into a gym. by Peggy Fletcher Stack. He also mentioned reading Quinns long Dialogue article about the politics of Ezra Taft Benson. This massive housecleaning may be one of the church's largest since the 1850s, when thousands were excommunicated for everything from poor hygiene . Maybe she wants to be, though. 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. The truth is not uplifting. Thats according to Quinnmy request to speak with Packer, whose health has badly deteriorated in recent years, was declined. He revised the story occasionally over the next decade, submitting it unsuccessfully to the Paris Review and the Atlantic. 1897 - First Presidency member George Q. Cannon used the media attention on the 1895 conviction and two-year imprisonment of famed Irish poet Oscar Wilde as an opportunity to pu Peggy Fletcher. They are called to them by the men at the very top of the hierarchy. The kindness of my ward members has been really important. But Packer certainly said similar things before larger audiences.
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