peggy fletcher stack excommunicated peggy fletcher stack excommunicated

[Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] 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. Hanks told him he had been excommunicated, and said that the court lasted six hours. Sometimes Stack refers to Salt Lake City . Quinn got hate mail. During Quinns New Orleans years, the First Presidency put out a statement discouraging Mormons from participating in academic conferences and other independent forums devoted to the discussion of their faith. Arrington). That higher-ranking leader, James Paramore, had further instructed West to say that the decision was Wests own, and had not come from above. But 90 percent of the ward has changed since my court. The cabin has no phone access, so I had months [after her initial conversation with the stake president] to think about it. 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 . 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. 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. Excommunication has played a significant role throughout the churchs history. I moved into recognizing the value and power of a lay priesthood in the body of Christ and Christian community. Peggy Fletcher Stack. A diligent historian, meanwhile, will come to see that the truth of the matter is complicated. Today my story was picked up by the Salt Lake Tribune in Peggy Fletcher Stack's thoughtful article about excommunication. Robert Kirby does this also, but much more indirectly. News. "Mormon facing excommunication makes his living off his podcasts," by Peggy Fletcher Stack, Salt Lake Tribune, February 8, 2015 "On Attempts to Smear (i.e., Being 'Fair Gamed'") by John Dehlin ; Faith Transition episodes on Mormon Stories . On March 23, 2018, Andersons husband, Paul, died of heart failure. Saturday, February 22, 1997. [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. 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. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted. Snuffer was excommunicated. Since then, only one Avraham Gileadi, an Old Testament scholar who has spent his life researching and . [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] He then expressed his gratitude to the church for providing, throughout his life, a vehicle for service. The truth is not uplifting. Thats according to Quinnmy request to speak with Packer, whose health has badly deteriorated in recent years, was declined. 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. I love the church. 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. 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. Quinn went to Californiahe had another fellowship at the Huntington Librarystaying this time with his mother. He said it was apostasy because I believed that general authorities had done something wrong. Hired in 1991 to cover Utah's various faiths, particularly Mormonism, Peggy has talked forgiveness with Archbishop Desmond Tutu . It did not happen overnight, but many LDS leaders seemed to regret the furor and the hurt that surrounded those excommunications. Fawn Brodie was related to David O. McKay. He does not have friends in Rancho Cucamonga. He was housesitting. The noisy nonsense on-screen felt to Quinn like a rough equivalent of what the church was doing to him. Peggy Fletcher Fletcher (Peggy Bennett Fletcher) See Photos. 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. [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. Hundreds of other members joined him at gatherings and in small groups, and thus was born the "remnant movement ," which today touts 1000s of adherents. 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. One Sunday in February of 1993, Michael Quinn was home sick with a fever when his doorbell rang. Mormon author Grant H. Palmer has been summoned to an LDS Church disciplinary hearing on Sunday, facing possible excommunication for apostasy. At its worst, such talk is sometimes called speaking evil of the Lords anointed.. She is in the right family. Quinn was shocked that it took that long. Quinn went over local church rolls and found addresses of kids who didnt come to Sunday services. She said hello, but he did not recognize her. Knowing that our Heavenly Parents are both male and female teaches me that our potential as women is limitless. Quinn and four othersLavina Fielding Anderson, Maxine Hanks (a distant relative of Paul Hanks, the stake president who showed up at Quinns apartment), Paul Toscano, and Avraham Gileadiwere excommunicated by stake presidents in Salt Lake City and Provo, Utah; a sixth, Lynn Whitesides, was disfellowshipped, meaning that she remained a member of the church but could not fully participate in its rites and activities. 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. However, I do not see that eternal equality reflected in the contemporary church.". While preparing for the retired Brigham Young University artists memorial service, Bishop Mahonri Madrigal read Pauls written testimony, or statements of faith, that the ward had compiled in 2000. I used to think Steve Benson was a bad person. 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. 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. I was not surprised or angry about the outcome, Anderson said Wednesday, and she has no plans to try to open that door again. 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 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. Whitesides says that Connie Chungs people asked her to take a hidden camera into her court. Quinn had been avoiding this confrontation for nearly five years. She won the Cornell Award for Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers from the Religious News Association in 2004, 2012, 2017, 2018, and 2022. Quinn had spent three years in the military in the late 60s, working in counterintelligence. In an April 1968 talk about military service, he described the restless, unchallenged young people who are repudiating their citizenship responsibilities by avoiding and protesting the draft. 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. "Mormonism was limiting to me, so I needed to test the limits to see who I and the church really might be. [Husband] Paul, Christian [their son] and I sang in the choir that day. A forum for ex-mormons and others who have been affected by mormonism to get support and share news, commentary, and comedy about the Mormon church. Peggy Fletcher Stack. LDS officials disciplined Anderson and five other Mormon intellectuals in and around the fall of 1993. 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. . A candlelight vigil was held outside the Salt Lake City meetinghouse where it took place. Mormonism was as much an identity issue for them as it is for me. And he based at least one of his forgeries on the work of Michael Quinn. In hindsight, the purge of September 1993 looks like the last big push for a kind of control that LDS leaders will probably never have again. c. 2014 Salt Lake Tribune(RNS) The Mormon Church insists that excommunication threats targeting activists Kate Kelly and John Dehlin were generated by their respective LDS leaders in Virginia and northern Utah.Others see the timing as evidence that the two disciplinary hearings are being coordinated from the faith's Salt Lake City headquarters.But this much is certain: If Mormon higher-ups . 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. Daryl Peveto/Luceo Images for Slate. He wept as he read it aloud to others. >Two years after an excommunicated Kate Kelly sought a giant leap, Mormon feminists keep making small steps toward equity . 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. 2012. Still, he sought out the scriptures first edition himself, and did his own comparison. Paul Toscano, a combative lawyer, showed up for his, at the Cottonwood Stake Center in the southern part of Salt Lake City. He acknowledged to me that, of course, it is possible to find outlets for service outside of Mormonism. 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. (He was delivering the third bombto whom it is not entirely clearwhen it blew up accidentally.) His wife Margaret, an English professor and feminist who attracted attention from church leaders before her husband did, was excommunicated in 2000. How have the members of your ward treated you? 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.. Quinn was convinced, in any case, that his fate in any disciplinary council was predetermined, that Boyd K. Packer wanted him out of the church and Hanks was going to make it happen. He subsequently has . If he doesnt, I have his phone number and I know where he lives. It is also worth noting that the church president in 1993 was an ailing Ezra Taft Benson. What I heard was that I would be excommunicated and that I shouldn't go. It was his death and funeral that prompted the couples current bishop to bring up the possibility of her rejoining the church. Maybe, I suggested, he was trying to bring his full self out into the open. He was excommunicated by the LDS Church in 2013 for refusing to cease publication of his 2011 book, Passing the Heavenly Gift which challenges many points of LDS orthodoxy. Sunstone The spiritual journey of Maxine Hanks, one of the "September Six,'" comes full circle. 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. (Quinn attempted to reach this friend through a third party before my piece was finished, but declined to give me his name before speaking to him.) 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. Quinn argued against excommunication, he told me, but he did not have the final say. This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. 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 . I heard she's not Mormon at all. In May, my stake president called me in about 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.. The churchs critics find the timing convenient: By 1890, the U.S. government had threatened to seize LDS property if polygamy wasnt renounced. 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. The president in 2012, when Hanks was readmitted, was Thomas S. Monson. Not long after that, the bishop met with Anderson and asked her ever so gently if she would like to discuss reinstatement. [5] She met Mike Stack when he volunteered as a photographer for Sunstone in 1984, and they married in October 1985. At first, his timing appeared serendipitous: In 1972, while he was completing a masters in history at the University of Utah, an academic named Leonard Arrington was appointed church historian. 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. The temple president tried to make it as good an experience as he could for my parents, Paul, Christian and Marina [his bride] and me. He revised the story occasionally over the next decade, submitting it unsuccessfully to the Paris Review and the Atlantic. P The Sunstone Symposium runs July 25-28 at the University of Utah's Olpin Student Union. He went to San Diego to give the keynote address for the annual conference held by Affirmation, a support group for gay and lesbian Mormons, and he stayed in California for several days afterward. This was hard on Paul [who works at Brigham Young University]. Even after that, a few high-ranking Mormons continued to authorize such marriages. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. I was removed from that situation. He has occasionally attended other churches. Quinns parents were divorced when he was 4, and he was raised largely by his mothers parents, who frequently fought. 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. The handbook doesn't say you can't speak in class, just over the pulpit. 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. . Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. . sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. She was told to pass along this message: Im tired of hearing him criticize the church. 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. He also criticized Ezra Taft Benson, then a senior apostle, who had made comments similar to Packers. Grant, an LDS Church president, a granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah, Wallace F. Bennett, and a granddaughter of American physicist Harvey Fletcher. 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. Her testimony was that of a believer, Madrigal later told her. I had a spiritual prompting that summer staying at my cabin that I wasn't to go. They can't ex someone with that king of lineage. (Peggy Fletcher Stack writes for The Salt Lake Tribune.) 1) I am very proud that, unlike the LDS Church, I have been transparent regarding OSF finances and my own compensation. But 90 percent of the ward has changed since my court. 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. 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. As she entered the building at 47 East South Temple, she happened to pass Boyd K. Packer on his way out. These are very sensitive and highly confidential and this is why I have not mentioned them before in writing. Hanks alluded to these matters in subsequent letters, but never explicitly said that he had Quinns sexuality in mind. 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. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax They never gave me one reason. On Sunday with similar church disciplinary actions threatening Mormon feminist Kate Kelly and blogger John Dehlin, Anderson discussed her spiritual journey: What triggered the LDS Church's disciplinary action against you? By Peggy Fletcher Stack. 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. The latter, a smaller school, offered less money, but BYU had its own drawbacks: It was and is a conservative place, politically as well as religiously. (He also, as it happens, officiated at the wedding of my parents.) 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. 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. Hymns were sung. I don't think I could have done that graciously. 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. The term "September Six" was coined by The Salt Lake Tribune and was used in the media and subsequent discussion. At Yale, while serving as one of two counselors to the local bishop, he found unanswered letters in the wards files from people who wished to leave the church. The Strengthening Church Members Committee almost certainly passed along notes about Quinn to his new stake president, Paul Hanks, in early 1993. deductible, 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. He asked Quinn to come see him in his office after work one day, Quinn says. After Quinn finished his lunch at BYU, he decided not to go home. 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. West refused to do this, according to Quinn. The most senior apostle, Howard W. Hunter, also suffered from serious health problems. Hired in 1991 to cover Utah's various faiths, particularly Mormonism, Peggy has talked forgiveness with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, nearly fainted waiting for the Dalai Lama, fasted with Muslims during Ramadan and has reported on 50 consecutive semiannual LDS General Conferences. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. After 18 months, he moved to New Orleans, where it was less expensive to live. (Benson died in 94, Hunter in 95.) The stake president said I was "exed" for apostasy but I didn't really fit the handbook definition. "All they asked me about was my relationship to Jesus Christ. But that was not how he experienced it. We embedded him as thoroughly in the church as we ourselves had been. Since I'm there every Sunday, I don't fit their model of an excommunicated member. Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. 9:30AM EDT 8/29/2017 Peggy Fletcher Stack/RNS. She was also the only one whose disciplinary council was overseen by her bishop, rather than her stake president. 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.