Religion Dispatches
…as Republicans. Non-Christians overwhelmingly voted Obama/Biden—62% to 36%—numbers that surpassed the group’s 20-point margin for John Kerry in 2004 and the 15-point margin for Al Gore in 2000. Other findings: • Protestant voters, evenly divided between being registered as Democrats and Republicans, sided with Sen. McCain by a 53% to 46% margin, which was just half the margin accorded to George W. Bush in 2004 (57% to 42%), but within range of the…
Read More…l Civil Forum held last Saturday at the 23,000 member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Those who gave it any consideration at all generally concluded that the sheer presence of both presidential candidates at a megachurch was an obvious breach of the supposed separation between church and state. Others who tended to this historic forum felt the whole conversation was largely uneventful as both candidates provided predictable answers t…
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In July of 2013, Salt Lake City photographer Katrina Barker Anderson launched Mormon Women Bare, a website featuring nude portraits of Mormon women. Anderson, who has a degree in broadcast journalism from Brigham Young University, spoke to me recently about the project. HW: What sort of attitudes about nudity did you grow up with? KBA: My mother is a painter; my father is a physician. So even as I grew up Mormon in small-town Ohio, I came from…
Read MoreOn Tuesday in Salt Lake City, Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solomonese delivered a 150,000-signature petition denouncing Elder Boyd K. Packer’s controversial October 2 General Conference declaring that homosexuality was “impure and unnatural” and may be overcome. At a press conference, Solomonese, who was accompanied by representatives of the American Psychological Association, Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons, Equality Utah, and the Ut…
Read More…ter of famous scenes from the Book of Mormon, Arnold Friberg, died in Salt Lake City at the age of 96 last week. Meanwhile, one New Yorker found a tombstone on the sidewalk and began a quest to find its rightful owner. HBO’s new documentary No One Dies in Lily Dale details the lives of Spiritualists in the town of Lily Dale, New York. Spiritualism arose in the nineteenth century among women mediums who channeled messages from the dead. Then, as no…
Read More…is April 6–7, veteran religion journalist Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune reports. The announcement comes after Mormon feminists and their allies mounted a “Let Women Pray” letter-writing campaign this winter. (LDS officials say that the Conference program was set “many weeks ago.”) Women’s advocates within the LDS Church like LDS WAVE have long pointed to the continuing restriction on women praying in the Church’s global meetings a…
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…handily demolish the Antichrist and his army, flinging them in a sulfurous lake. Hagee has been hammering at this for decades. His 1996 book, Beginning of the End: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist, is a perfect example of how he juxtaposes his stature as a political player with his apocalytpic visions. On the one hand, he was ardently opposed to the Oslo peace accords Rabin signed; on the other, he makes sure to tell th…
Read More…ugh on-demand cable—with some rumors of technical difficulties in the Salt Lake / Provo areas—reaction is filtering back from Mormon viewers of the film. LDS Church spokespeople have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that seq…
Read More…my brother Todd, had sneaked it onto my back porch when I was looking the other way. Because no one is more ruthless than a gardener with a garden full of zucchini. Garrison Keillor once said the only time Lutherans in Lake Wobegon lock their car doors in the church parking lot is in August. Otherwise they are likely to come out of Sunday service to find that someone has left a grocery bag full of zucchinis on the front car seat….
Read More…uvian viejitas sharing a sack lunch in the shade of the great granite Salt Lake Temple, built more than a century ago by Anglo-American pioneers like my great-great-great grandfather. The young blonde-haired, pink-stiletto wearing 21st century daughters of the original Utah pioneers. I wanted to write about Mormons in their beauty, their humanness, their contemporaneity, their diversity. I even wanted to share how an unorthodox Mormon like me is d…
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