He revised the story occasionally over the next decade, submitting it unsuccessfully to the Paris Review and the Atlantic. This was hard on Paul [who works at Brigham Young University]. I had a spiritual prompting that summer staying at my cabin that I wasn't to go. The all-male priesthood leaders in his Willow Creek Sandy LDS stake could have excommunicated the 64-year-old author, but chose instead a . "Nobody asked me to disavow my book or stop writing," Hanks told The Salt Lake Tribune that year. Would love to hear your stories about her. 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. The churchs critics find the timing convenient: By 1890, the U.S. government had threatened to seize LDS property if polygamy wasnt renounced. The book won an award from the American Historical Association, but it brought Quinn more grief in Utah. Caffeinated Version: Most people don't know I've been excommunicated. After Paul Toscano was excommunicated, Steve Benson, grandson of the then Mormon prophet, met privately with the apostles Dallin H. Oaks and Neal A. Maxwell, and asked them aboutamong many other thingsthe rumor that Packer had something to do with it. If there is unfinished business, its the First Presidencys, not mine.. Photo by George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. England said he knew about this espionage systemit was called the Strengthening Church Members Committee, and it compiled documents and highlighted statements considered critical of the church. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. The same group of local church leaders who participated in Gileadi's excommunication were present at the baptism service. Quinn wrote back more harshly this time, listing all the things Hanks had done that troubled him. (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. . 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. In her paper, she mentioned an internal espionage system that creates and maintains secret files on members of the church. A BYU literature professor named Eugene England rose to speak as soon as Anderson finished. The other five people who were by then being referred to as the September Six had already faced their courts. It went back to his college years. Quinn attended that ward in Westwood every week while he was in California. 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. Whitesides says that Connie Chungs people asked her to take a hidden camera into her court. I could imagine the First Presidency thinking that this is not an episode worth revisiting, Bowman wrote in an email. At least, that's how Hall sees it. 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.. He was 32; he and his wife, Jan, were expecting their fourth child. Hed read the essay about women and the priesthood, and he asked Quinn to speak on the subject at an upcoming fireside, an informal evening meeting often held at Mormon meetinghouses. But nothing else has driven him to contribute to the lives of others the way the faith in which he was born and raised once did. All rights reserved. In 1999, she joined the Interfaith Roundtable for the 2002 Winter Olympics, where she enjoyed the association of representatives from various faiths and led the annual Interfaith Week. Mike Quinn in his Rancho Cucamonga home in California this summer. See Photos. He never wrote another work of fiction. Ive had more than one therapist Ive talked to about this issue say, Dont you see that you were purposely setting yourself up for this fall? he told me. Re: Kate Kelly Shreds Peggy Fletcher Stack for Using Her as "Clickbait" Crucially, much of that project is onlinemore than anything, the Internet has revolutionized the field. I did. We were sitting in the front room of a house owned by a gay couple he knows in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Salt Lake City. Former Mormon leader is building a new life -- as a woman - Rick Alan Ross The church declined to comment on the decision. In order to have her blessings fully restored, she had to meet with a general authority at church headquarters. Packer approved Quinns hiring, but he may have come to regret it five years later. Snuffer was excommunicated. By Peggy Fletcher Stack | Sep. 5, 2019, 1:20 p.m. | Updated: 11:59 p.m. . 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. 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. One Sunday in February of 1993, Michael Quinn was home sick with a fever when his doorbell rang. The stake president shook our hands and was cordial. The cabin has no phone access, so I had months [after her initial conversation with the stake president] to think about it. He developed a fervent testimony not only that God exists but that God spoke to Joseph Smith face to face and that the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants are, like the Old and New Testaments, divinely inspired. In the first few days after the bombings, several people who had come into contact with Hofmann feared for their lives. Like Quinn, hed first become interested in Mormon history when he learned that polygamy had gone on for years after its public abandonmenthe knew about this because his mothers parents were among the secret polygamists. Mormons devote one sacrament meeting each month to personal testimonies, and Quinn was sure this would be his last opportunity to offer his in church. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax Mormon author Grant H. Palmer has been summoned to an LDS Church disciplinary hearing on Sunday, facing possible excommunication for apostasy. Box 15 miles from where he was staying, and in New Orleans he had it delivered to a receiving center a little ways from his apartment. I heard she's not Mormon at all. He left quietly and went to call the LDS Church Office Building to ask about this committee. SALT LAKE CITY (AP) Laurie Lee Hall was excommunicated from the Mormon church for being a woman. At the pinnacle of the Mormon hierarchy is the First Presidencythe churchs prophet and his two counselorsand the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Vern Anderson, the AP reporter, wrote an 800-word story about the essay in January, just before Hanks showed up at Quinns apartment. [4] During her time there, she has met and interviewed the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Gordon B. Hinckley, among others. [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] Quinn argued against excommunication, he told me, but he did not have the final say. When I make comments in Sunday school and Relief Society, they are accepted as anyone else's. He recounted what his former stake president, Hugh West, had done when he received what Quinn saw as similar orders from above. The book he was finishing, which would be published in 1994, was called The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power. "But when I got to the point of priestly ordination, I pulled back. Peggy Fletcher was raised in New Jersey, daughter of physicist Robert Chipman Fletcher and Rosemary Bennett, one of five girls and three boys. For details, go to http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium. That higher-ranking leader, James Paramore, had further instructed West to say that the decision was Wests own, and had not come from above. "Mormonism was limiting to me, so I needed to test the limits to see who I and the church really might be. The stake president, who oversees a number of congregations, remained optimistic, she said, zeroing in on the words, at this time., But the writer replied, Theres hope, and then theres experience., Besides, she said, it was a form letter.. If he doesnt, I have his phone number and I know where he lives. SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) After years of tension between Mormons and gay rights activists -- with political action and theological pronouncements on one . PDF Peggy fletcher stack excommunicated - World Tile The Mormon intellectual community far and wide is mourning the loss of Linda King Newell. Peggy Fletcher Stack - WikiMili, The Best Wikipedia Reader ", This page was last edited on 30 November 2022, at 04:21. He slept on her futon and had no Internet access or health insurance. He loves cities, and when he lived in New Orleans in the early 90s, he made friends in bars and in an informal group of gay professionals who gathered once a month. ", 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]. Peggy Fletcher. She has participated as much as she was able playing the piano and singing in the choir and watched as seven lay bishops have come and gone. June 19, 2014 ; 1 of 9; SCHOLAR REBAPTIZED INTO LDS CHURCH - Deseret News Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. "Nobody asked me to disavow my book or stop writing," Hanks said. 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. I love John and I support him, but I have never made any claim against truth claims of the church. Some church leaders continued to marry multiple wives, which is why there was a Second Manifesto in 1904, during the Reed Smoot congressional hearings. They can't ex someone with that king of lineage. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. What's happening is so wrong. (He also, as it happens, officiated at the wedding of my parents.) This massive housecleaning may be one of the church's largest since the 1850s, when thousands were excommunicated for everything from poor hygiene . This is maybe where John and I are very different. One of the central questions in the aftermath of Septembers events was just how involved Packer himself had been in them. The church's definition of "membership" includes all persons who were ever baptized, or whose parents were members while the person was under the age of eight (called "members . When interviewing Quinn in 76, Packer said, I have a hard time with historians, because they idolize the truth. 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. 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. They didn't say anything. I prayed every article I wrote into print, he said, continually asking God what he should do. People named Peggy Fletcher. ", 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. I have kept my covenants, remained close to the church and have felt that what I have done is accepted by the Lord, the Salt Lake City editor and writer said. LDS bloggers issue statement of support More than 70 Mormon bloggers, representing a dozen or more websites, have signed a document, "Room for All in This Church," calling for "clemency" in the upcoming disciplinary councils for Kate Kelly and John Dehlin. 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. Quinn went to Californiahe had another fellowship at the Huntington Librarystaying this time with his mother. . Looking back, it was a real blessing. He normalized what many call "sinful" behavior, by admitting to looking at nudie mags, drinking, smoking, and intimated other transgressions, yet still going on a mission. Stack is an advisor on religion to the Public Broadcasting Service,[2] and has written two books. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. But Packer certainly said similar things before larger audiences. Peggy Fletcher-Stack. Many of the shifts in the church administration's position toward intellectuals recently has had to do with history and intellectual openness, while the issues driving Lavinas excommunication are still very much alive and unresolved today., It is possible, Bowman posits, there was fear that allowing for her rebaptism would send a signal on those issues that the First Presidency did not wish to send.. And he continued to correspond with Paul Hanks, who had written to express his displeasure at seeing his words quoted in the newspaper. Some, perhaps, simply regretted the bad press. . Elder Packer, he told Quinn, will never get over this.. False Prophet Gaining Steam Among a 'Remnant' Church He got up in front of the congregation and declared his belief in the Mormon gospel, in Joseph Smiths status as a prophet of God, and in the Book of Mormon as divine scripture. 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. Peggy Fletcher Stack - The Salt Lake Tribune As she entered the building at 47 East South Temple, she happened to pass Boyd K. Packer on his way out. Hed been told it was an unusually accepting congregation. 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. Within the past few years, Bradley had a change of heart and was rebaptized. Down in Provo, Avraham Gileadi met more quietly with his local leaders. Dave: We remind our listeners about a new way to support Mormon Land. September Six - Wikipedia They are called to them by the men at the very top of the hierarchy. It took several hoursa vigil was held outside for the first few, with candles and hymns and hot chocolate. Mormon higher-ups hold keys to excommunication process against two He was in a wheelchair. A box of old photos belonging to Michael Quinn at his home. A beaming Bishop Madrigal said I should expect very soon to get a telephone call scheduling an interview with a general authority, she wrote. (These soon-to-be former Mormons were not required to attend.) 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. Timeline of teachings on homosexuality in the Church of Jesus Christ of The men at his door were the local stake president and his two counselors, the men responsible for overseeing all the congregations in the area. He was housesitting. 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. Arrington). They don't feel safe enough to keep going it's such a terrible, terrible loss. 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 Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. Kelly was excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in June. by Peggy Fletcher Stack (Salt Lake Tribune) 06-23-2015. They can't ex someone with that king of lineage. Dallin Oaks speaking at the General Conference in April 1989. Peggy Fletcher Stack (@religiongal) / Twitter He had, after all, believed for many years that he would someday be a leader of the church, knowing that if this were true he would have to forever suppress an essential part of himself. Those 15 men oversee the multiple Quorums of the Seventy, who in turn direct the stake presidents and bishops who minister to congregations on a part-time, voluntary basis. (In 1985, an Arizona man filed an $18 million lawsuit against the LDS church for not allowing him to do so. (They draw numbers to pick sides.) sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return | Out of Obscurity (Benson died in 94, Hunter in 95.) Until 23 years ago, one could not formally leave the church without being excommunicated. 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. He, the bishop, and the other counselor held the necessary courts, excommunicating those who wanted out. 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. 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. The bombings and subsequent murder trial cast a pall over the practice of Mormon history. Peggy Fletcher Stack, Author at Religion News Service - Page 2 of 6 When something like [my excommunication] blows up, the first casualty is trust and that never comes back. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. After 20 years, this excommunicated Mormon still attends her LDS ward This is all lies! he told the friend who showed it to him. Local TV reporters were filming the session, and the AP reporter Vern Anderson was sitting at the far side of the room about halfway back. 1511: Mormon Stories Transparency Q&A for Peggy Fletcher Stack and Tony He compared Packers treatment of Church leaders to the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, which is anathema to Mormons. Even in the novels, he noticed, the gay characters came to terrible ends. For her part, Anderson always has felt a great sense of peace that I made a moral decision, an ethical decision, a decision of integrity and conscience, she wrote. She won the Cornell Award for Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers from the Religious News Association in 2004, 2012, 2017, 2018, and 2022. 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. But Robertson is especially pleased with the "Pillars" session. 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. These men are often referred to by Mormon faithful as the Brethren. Unlike local lay leaders, who hold secular day jobs and perform their ecclesiastical duties on a voluntary basis, they are full-time employees who oversee the global operations of the church. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. The prophet at the time was Ezra Taft Benson, who, at age 94, was mostly incapacitated. The church reports a worldwide membership of 16 million. One of Ordain Womens founders, Kate Kelly, was excommunicated in June 2014. He moved back to Utah and began receiving mail at his actual address. Knowing her personally (not closely, but we're acquainted) I get the feeling that she is much more culturally LDS than actually LDS. The general authority assigned to interview Quinn in the spring of 1976 was Boyd K. Packer. [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] Where a skeptic sees convenience, a believer may see Gods hand. Quinns status in the church remained unchanged. 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. Anderson was photographed at her Salt Lake City home with the work of her late husband, Paul L. Anderson, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019. Quinn, who later assisted the police in their investigation, did not go home for several days. In 2004, after a series of fellowships and visiting appointments, he was the only finalist for a tenured position at the University of Utah. Look at Steve Benson, I suspect that there was no way they were going to ex him so he exed himself. Running almost 100 pages and including nearly 400 footnotes, the essay was the fruit of decades of thought and research. The timing of his career, which once appeared serendipitous, now seems almost cruel. The nature of religion reporting in Utah is changing. 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. 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.. [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. Maybe she wants to be, though. We had a family devotional every night with prayer, singing and scripture reading. That's a good question. Hanks became less diplomatic. On Sept. 30 he called Hanks to ask what the court had decided. Following the wave of media attention that greeted the September excommunications, the First Presidency defended what had taken place. Where else would I be but in the church? 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. By Peggy Fletcher Stack January 3, 2013. JDK-8141210 : Very slow loading of JavaScript file with recent JDK The term "September Six" was coined by The Salt Lake Tribune and was used in the media and subsequent discussion. The Salt Lake Tribune's Peggy Fletcher Stack, a . Many people do reside in the borderlands between Mormon and not. 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. It's Judgment Day for Far Right: LDS Church Purges Survivalists Peggy Fletcher Profiles | Facebook Peggy Fletcher Stack - Wikipedia Born in 1924 in Brigham City, Utah, the 10th of 11 children, Packer worked for years as a teacher and administrator in the Church Educational System. 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. There, he tried other kinds of writing, thinking maybe hed put Mormon history behind him. With his background in education, he became interested in how the church taught its own past, and decided he did not like what was going on at the church historians office. Religion Two decades after she was "exed," Utah writer still attends her LDS ward. News. If Peggy wanted to do some groundbreaking . In the past, many Mormon officials had a sense, he said, that the church must protect its members from "wolves among them.". By Peggy Fletcher Stack. The seventh son of Taylors third wife, Samuel sympathetically portrays his notorious father, who continued to marry multiple wives well after the LDS church officially renounced polygamy in 1890. I assured him I did not. Quinn got hate mail. The stake president, a man named Paul Hanks, tried to step into the apartment as he said hello, Quinn recalls. McMurrin Differed in Gentler Times. They can't ex someone with that king of lineage. After the church court, when I walked into the chapel, it took about three times longer to get to my seat because so many people hugged me. In the summer of 1952, the late Sterling McMurrin, an eminent philosopher and writer, met with two LDS apostles to defend his theological views.With complete candor, McMurrin laid out for Elders Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold . Jay Christian, left, and thousands of other people protest against the passage of Californias Proposition 8 outside the world headquarters of Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 2008 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Grant, an LDS Church president, a granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah, Wallace F. Bennett, and a granddaughter of American physicist Harvey Fletcher. Mormons from around the world have gathered to listen to church leaders during the two-day conference. This made some church leaders uneasy. 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.
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