Latest from Mormon Land: New biography examines how Emma Smith felt ‘betrayed’ by Joseph’s polygamy
Also: Remembering historian D. Michael Quinn, a new look for temples, and a sex therapist fights to regain her membership.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Emma Hale Smith, wife of church founder Joseph Smith.
| April 29, 2021, 2:30 p.m.
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‘Mormon Land’: Remembering historian D. Michael Quinn his contributions, his conflicts, his legacy and his life
Fellow historian Ross Peterson reflects on his friend, who was excommunicated from the LDS Church but never stopped believing in it.
(Tribune file photo) HIstorian D. Michael Quinn at the LDS Church History Library on Aug. 9, 2013. Quinn died last week at age 77.
| April 28, 2021, 8:01 p.m.
D. Michael Quinn, the noted historian who died last week at 77, had an outsized impact on academic explorations of the church’s past.
He was a prodigious researcher, who wrote 10 books and numerous essays. Though a believer in the faith’s founding events, Quinn resigned from church-owned Brigham Young University under pressure and subsequently was excommunicated from the faith in 1993 as part of the famed “September Six” for his writings about women and the priesthood, as well as about post-Manifesto polygamy.
| Updated: 2:25 a.m.
D. Michael Quinn was once among Mormonism’s most celebrated historians, lauded for his memory, work ethic and charisma even prompting predictions that he would become the official historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or one of the faith’s governing apostles.
Quinn, who was discovered dead Wednesday of unspecified causes at his home in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., saw no conflict between the church’s history and his faith.
Still, his compulsion to understand every detail of the Latter-day Saint past, starting in his teen years in the 1960s, put him on a collision course with his church. It would culminate in September 1993, when the Yale-trained scholar was drummed out of Utah-based church for apostasy based on his historical writings about women and the priesthood, along with polygamy.