Dear Reader: When I began this series of essays on leadership, I never anticipated the final installment would chronicle recent events that have triggered the biggest spiritual struggle of my life. 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. Paul usually sits on the outside of the pew, so when the sacrament comes, he shakes his head toward me so we don't have any socially embarrassing moments. He referred to the pathos that I felt in your private letters to mea plea to not be discarded from something that you love. I want to help resolve that pathos, he added, and a sadness that seems to pervade your private writing to me.. 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. In May, my stake president called me in about it. 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. Years ago, Don Bradley, a longtime scholar of Mormon history, asked to have his name removed from LDS membership rolls when participation became uncomfortable. She said hello, but he did not recognize her. 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. 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. ``It was like `We're here to support you, Brother Gileadi,' '' he said of the atmosphere at the . And it was not popular with those of the brethren that Quinn had already angered with his talk on Mormon history four years before. He then announced that I was not a member in good standing and could not use my temple recommend. Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. 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. During Sunday school, a man approached him and said, The bishop would like to talk to you. Quinn dreaded what was coming. I did. For the next year and a half, Quinn spent hours every week in the archives, taking detailed notes on diaries that belonged to 19th-century Mormon leaders, among other documents. After reading Peggy Fletcher Stack's article (linked in April's post), I realized that many of us share Lavina's ongoing concerns, including the exclusion of women from institutional authority and the side-stepping of the Heavenly Mother doctrine. Quinn was already on the alert for such wrinkles in the churchs history. It was not the last time he helped to excommunicate people, though. Peggy Fletcher Fletcher (Peggy Bennett Fletcher) See Photos. Excommunication opened the door to a larger cosmos, inside and outside myself.". When they did, Quinn, an only child, would go to his room, put on a classical record, and turn the volume up. He compared Packers treatment of Church leaders to the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, which is anathema to Mormons. This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. BYU and Utah State both wanted to hire him. Excommunication has played a significant role throughout the churchs history. Dave: We remind our listeners about a new way to support Mormon Land. I cannot be anything but a Mormon. While the simpler approach is handled by a bishop and his two counselors, the more elaborate version is run by a stake president, and it involves not only his two counselors but the stakes high council, a group of 12 men. Men only become gay in prison, or sometimes in the Navy. He didn't seem to know what footnotes are so he thought I made the whole thing up. The bearded dad, a father of 11 who was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2015 for apostasy, suggests they sing hymns . Hed been told it was an unusually accepting congregation. Peggy Fletcher Stack, The Salt Lake Tribune, 24 Nov. 2022 To that end, the power that Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger bring is their personal stories of defiance and excommunication. The former LDS stake president, who oversaw a group of Mormon congregations in Tooele for eight years and worked as an architect on her faith's most sacred spaces, faced, in her mind, an impossible choice: Either return to living as a man or resign her . West said hed been told by a higher authority to take further action to remedy the situation, Quinn says. Report a missed paper by emailingsubscribe@sltrib.comor calling801-237-2900, For e-edition questions or comments, contact customer support801-237-2900or emailsubscribe@sltrib.com. (They draw numbers to pick sides.) 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. Peggy Fletcher Stack. "Mormonism was limiting to me, so I needed to test the limits to see who I and the church really might be. He was the first academic to occupy the post, previously held only by high-ranking LDS leaders, and his appointment signaled a broader effort to reorganize the historians office along professional lines. Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. 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. 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. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. I love Jesus. Being treated like an ordinary person is a gift a ward can give. After Quinn finished his lunch at BYU, he decided not to go home. "Nobody asked me to disavow my book or stop writing," Hanks said. He stinks.. My strong hunch is that she is a cultural Mormon who no longer believes, pays tithing or observes the WoW, and that she's loosey-goosey with her attendance. 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. We had a family devotional every night with prayer, singing and scripture reading. [5] She then received a fellowship to work in the Church History Division of the LDS Church (then run by Leonard J. The Mormon intellectual community far and wide is mourning the loss of Linda King Newell. 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. 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. In both forms of LDS courts, the accused is typically allowed to bring in character witnesses. 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. What's it like going to church for two decades as an excommunicated member? He took a fellowship at the Huntington Library, near his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., and began indexing his enormous collection of notes on old Mormon documents, in preparation for his next book. Dubbed the September Six, the group were mostly left-leaning writers and scholars who had published articles or given talks about the role of women in Mormonism and the way the churchs leaders handle dissent. 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. I didn't have to look at the councilmen and wonder what they said about me. After 18 months, he moved to New Orleans, where it was less expensive to live. Quinn argued against excommunication, he told me, but he did not have the final say. Soon after, he happened to attend, with some friends, a meeting of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a splinter sect that believes Joseph Smiths son, not Brigham Young, was Smiths rightful successor as prophet. [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. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. sltrib.com. 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. He wept as he read it aloud to others. Peggy Fletcher Stack. Knowing her personally (not closely, but we're acquainted) I get the feeling that she is much more culturally LDS than actually LDS. By then an assistant district attorney, Lambert later helped prosecute the case against Hofmann. 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. 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. The movie was a live-action adaptation of the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. 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. June 17, 2014 8:59 pm . He turned 65 two years later, making him eligible for Social Security and Medicare. The second thing that happens is members learn to be afraid of leaders, and leaders learn to be afraid of members. 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. Like Robert Kirby, it would be a shit storm to ex her. Ill come get him. 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. In the quarter-century since her ouster, Anderson consistently has attended weekly services at her Latter-day Saint congregation, the Whittier Ward. When something like [my excommunication] blows up, the first casualty is trust and that never comes back. 2012. Quinn refused. 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. It went back to his college years. Last edited on 30 November 2022, at 04:21, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Speaking Tubes in the Household of Faith", "A Light Unto the World: Image Building Is Anathema to Christian Living", "From the Editors: Stretching Toward the Light", "From the Editors: A Failure to Communicate", "Church Historian: Evolution of a Calling", "Tales of a true believer: picking up faith along the way", "Books: Mormon Novels Entertain While Teaching Lessons", "Twenty Years Ago in Sunstone: Symbol and Promise", "Peggy Fletcher Stack: Happy 100th to my physicist father, who remains a truth seeker in science and faith", "Utahn who pioneered synthesized stereo sound will receive posthumous Grammy", "Despite Growth, Mormons Find New Hurdles", "Nobody Knows Religion Quite Like Peggy Fletcher Stack", "Religion Newswriters Association honors top religion reporting", "Religion News Association names winners of 2017 Awards for Excellence in Religion Reporting", "Winners named in 2018 RNA Awards for Religion Reporting Excellence", "Journalism Awards - Winners and Articles", "The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Local Reporting: The Salt Lake Tribune Staff", "Religion Newswriters Association announces 2008 contest winners", "Religion Newswriters Association names winners of 2015 Awards for Excellence in Religion Reporting", "Religion News Association names winners of 2016 Awards for Excellence in Religion Reporting", "SL Tribune's Peggy Fletcher Stack wins top religion reporting prize for fifth year", "Dreams, Dollars, and Dr. Pepper: Allen Roberts & Peggy Fletcher Years (19781980)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peggy_Fletcher_Stack&oldid=1124718303, "Nation's Founders: How Religious Were They? In the field of Mormon history the changes are particularly pronounced. In the late 60s, he was called to preside over the churchs missionary efforts in New England, and moved with his family to Cambridge, Mass. [9] She started the "Faith" column after a discussion with Tribune editor Jay Shelledy. In the first few days after the bombings, several people who had come into contact with Hofmann feared for their lives. 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. Lavina Fielding Anderson, one of the famed September Six writers and scholars disciplined by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1993, got a big no last week to her request for rebaptism from the men who matter most: the faiths governing First Presidency. Fulton has called Quinn a nothing person.. He was troubled by the openness with which materials were being made available to certain individuals other than those authorized, according to Lucile C. Tates admiring 1995 biography, Boyd K. Packer: Watchman on the Tower. The regional council forwarded her request to church headquarters, with the recommendation that she be approved for rebaptism. At least, that's how Hall sees it. Maybe she wants to be, though. Quinn, who later assisted the police in their investigation, did not go home for several days. She and five other journalists at the Salt Lake Tribune won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. He had become a father figure of sorts, even officiating at Quinns marriage ceremony. Following his excommunication, he finished The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power and turned his attention to another scholarly book with deep personal meaning. When he came to understand this aspect of himself, and learned a name for it, he did what was already typical of him at that age: He went to the library. 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. Some, perhaps, simply regretted the bad press. It's a way for me to participate and contribute, almost like having a calling. Quinn read fiction, too, including James Baldwins new book, Giovannis Room. This is not entirely uncommon in Mormon culture, but Quinn took it sincerely to heart.
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