There were stretches of time when he was the only deacon, and he and I would exchange glances as he passed the sacrament to our row. 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 Peggy Fletcher Stack. Quinn was so depressed by the experience that for a few weeks he lost his belief in God completely. 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. I said I didn't think members believe general authorities don't make mistakes. Until 23 years ago, one could not formally leave the church without being excommunicated. 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. 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. 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. He put down in words his sincere testimony in the Mormon gospel and in Ezra Taft Bensons status as a true prophet of God. Just go to . 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. From an early age, he felt within himself the presence of God, this burning of the spirit, as he says. This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. The high council also heard from Andersons son, Christian, who offered his personal assessment. I attended the Sunstone Symposium this past summer, held on the University of Utah campus, and many people I spoke to there said that as Packers influence has waned, a more tolerant approach to dissent is taking hold. Peggy Fletcher Stack writes for the Salt Lake Tribune. They divorced soon after. The same group of local church leaders who participated in Gileadi's excommunication were present at the baptism service. McLean invited her, she said, to describe her faith in a letter, which includes her conviction that God cherishes everyone. 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.. 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. He himself did not even stay in town. The book, published a decade before, was written by Taylors son Samuel, best known today, perhaps, for writing the short story that became The Absent-Minded Professor. 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. 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. During Sunday school, a man approached him and said, The bishop would like to talk to you. Quinn dreaded what was coming. There are important aspects of Mormon life, such as temple ceremonies, that are open only to the truly faithful. He froze. This was hard on Paul [who works at Brigham Young University]. But he could no longer go to the temple. 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. 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 it also betrayed tensions within the church that may never entirely go away. I prayed every article I wrote into print, he said, continually asking God what he should do. Lavina Fielding Anderson decided not to appear at her court, either, which took place at another Salt Lake meetinghouse a few days afterward. 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. LDS officials disciplined Anderson and five other Mormon intellectuals in and around the fall of 1993. Salt Lake City Laurie Lee Hall was excommunicated from the LDS Church for being a woman. 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. 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. I go over the temple ceremony and the covenants in my mind and remake them before the Lord often. Still, he sought out the scriptures first edition himself, and did his own comparison. He slept on her futon and had no Internet access or health insurance. Paul's mother was great. The meaning of EXCOMMUNICATION is an ecclesiastical censure depriving a person of the rights of church membership. By Peggy Fletcher Stack By David Noyce For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Mormon church has excommunicated one of its top leaders. 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. Truth is, she has never stopped attending her Mormon ward. To this day, I would have made exactly the same decision. The church declined to comment on the decision. By Peggy Fletcher Stack June 23, 2015 Many Mormon feminists experienced Kate Kelly's excommunication as a harsh slap felt around the world. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. Then I went away to my cabin for the summer and he called all the temples in Utah, saying he was canceling my recommend. 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. [5][8] During her time with the magazine, she helped turn around its finances, saving it from closing. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. Log in or sign up for Facebook to connect with friends, family and people you know. The most senior apostle, Howard W. Hunter, also suffered from serious health problems. 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. 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. It was not the last time he helped to excommunicate people, though. It's a way for me to participate and contribute, almost like having a calling. I admire her. On Tuesday morning, James J. Hamula was released from his position in the First Quorum of the Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after disciplinary Peggy Fletcher-Stack: Hi Dave. And he based at least one of his forgeries on the work of Michael Quinn. As Quinn writes, the Manifesto inherited ambiguity, was created in ambiguity, and produced ambiguity.. 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. 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. Knowing that our Heavenly Parents are both male and female teaches me that our potential as women is limitless. This new knowledge sent Quinn to the Journal of Discourses, a 26-volume collection of Mormon sermons. Quinns parents were divorced when he was 4, and he was raised largely by his mothers parents, who frequently fought. Peggy Fletcher Stack Senior religion reporter. (Rick Bowmer/AP) This article is more than 8 years old. Few people had attended the talk itself, but an independent BYU newspaper ran a story about it, and copies of Quinns remarks, titled On Being a Mormon Historian, began to circulate. He said it was apostasy because I believed that general authorities had done something wrong. Mystery! As she entered the building at 47 East South Temple, she happened to pass Boyd K. Packer on his way out. [9] She started the "Faith" column after a discussion with Tribune editor Jay Shelledy. "We pray that a spirit of clemency will guide the words and actions of everyone especially those who bear the heavy responsibility of ecclesiastical discipline of church members and that the words of President [Dieter F.] Uchtdorf [second counselor in faith's governing First Presidency] will hold sway: "Regardless of your circumstances, your personal history, or the strength of your testimony, there is room for you in this church. 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. If Peggy wanted to do some groundbreaking . Look at Steve Benson, I suspect that there was no way they were going to ex him so he exed himself. 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. The regional council forwarded her request to church headquarters, with the recommendation that she be approved for rebaptism. 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. He has occasionally attended other churches. This is all lies! he told the friend who showed it to him. He also mentioned reading Quinns long Dialogue article about the politics of Ezra Taft Benson. "Given who I was, there was no place to go but out," Hanks said in 2003, on the 10th anniversary of the excommunications. She was also the only one whose disciplinary council was overseen by her bishop, rather than her stake president. Feb 17. "But when I got to the point of priestly ordination, I pulled back. 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. (KUTV) Peggy Fletcher Stack is the religion writer for the The Salt Lake Tribune.It's the best beat on the paper, she said.Stack fell into the job when she was hired in 1991.I have no degree in . Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. It took several hoursa vigil was held outside for the first few, with candles and hymns and hot chocolate. I love Jesus. Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. 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. On March 23, 2018, Andersons husband, Paul, died of heart failure. She was told to pass along this message: Im tired of hearing him criticize the church. But 90 percent of the ward has changed since my court. 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. June 17, 2014 8:59 pm . 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. Quinn told friends that he did not want anyone to lobby on his behalf. Not long after that, the bishop met with Anderson and asked her ever so gently if she would like to discuss reinstatement. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. The suit was settled out of court and a process for voluntary withdrawal was established in 1989.). Even in the novels, he noticed, the gay characters came to terrible ends. The church has control of my membership; I decide whether I'm Mormon or not. These three shocks to Quinns testimonyabout the Book of Mormon, polygamy, and LDS theologyspurred a pursuit to unearth and understand those parts of his religions past that complicated the simpler story of the faith he had learned as a child. [5] She then attended the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California for two years, where she studied religious history. By then, Quinn had more or less moved on. Press J to jump to the feed. The former LDS stake president, who oversaw a group of congregations in Tooele for eight years and worked as an architect on her faith's most sacred spaces, faced, in her mind, an . . (Quinn is known professionally as D. Michael Quinn; the first name on his birth certificate is Dennis.) He was excommunicated in 1911. I had received a blessing from a former stake president, assuring me that when the time was right, it would come very easily, so I could be at peace. SALT LAKE CITY (AP) Laurie Lee Hall was excommunicated from the Mormon church for being a woman. 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. "The issues in Mormon doctrine, history and practice highlighted by those facing church discipline are much larger than any one individual," the statement reads. (He also, as it happens, officiated at the wedding of my parents.) That night, we went over to our neighbors' house and watched "A Man for All Seasons" and ate popcorn. Gileadi was not part of the Sunstone and Dialogue circles that the others moved in; he had been writing and teaching popular workshops about biblical and Book of Mormon prophecies, which appear to have been deemed false doctrine by LDS leaders. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. 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. That has been a blessing truly fulfilled. Peggy Fletcher-Stack. [5] She met Mike Stack when he volunteered as a photographer for Sunstone in 1984, and they married in October 1985. The movie was a live-action adaptation of the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. [5][7][8] From 1978 to 1986, she was the third editor of Sunstone. (He was delivering the third bombto whom it is not entirely clearwhen it blew up accidentally.) 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. (Benson died in 94, Hunter in 95.) The Mormon church is organized into congregations called wards; a group of these is called a stake. Maxine Hanks was held in the same stake center one week before, though she did not attend it. 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