Word: mormons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Your article on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was very well done [RELIGION, Aug. 4]. I have been a Mormon all my life, attending meetings, paying tithes and offerings, teaching children and adults in church classes, etc. We Mormons believe that the sacrifice of worldly goods is an important principle, requiring faith in God as it does, but we also believe in freedom to exercise moral agency--which means, as far as monetary contributions are concerned, each member is free to pay or not. Your report made it seem as if Mormons are under a great...
...Internal Revenue Service should study the Mormon church's use of power and guilt to collect a 10% tithe from its members. The IRS might find out what happens to church members who fall short of the 10%: privileges and positions are withheld; there is no admission to any temple; and they cannot reach the top rank of the three levels of heaven. TRACY A. BREEDING Denton...
Standing beside a clean-cut young couple dressed rather formally for the summer weather, I looked out over Adam's home, a broad green valley that is currently planted in corn. Smith planned a town here that never took hold, just one among several Mormon promised lands, from Kirtland, Ohio, to Independence, Mo., that he and his flock were violently driven from. The public did not like Mormons in those days (segments of it still don't) and charged them with a host of crimes ranging from fraternizing with native "savages" to advocating the abolition of slavery. Smith's early...
...drove east out of Eden across the Mississippi, reflecting that perhaps Smith's prophecies were not so wacky after all. Even Mark Twain (a notorious Mormon mocker who famously dissed the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print") set his own idyllic fables along the riverway. Indeed, if God had planted Eden in America, he could not have found better soil or growing weather. Even the air smells fertile in northern Missouri--humid, rich and fertile--almost malted...
...frontier jail where Smith was killed lies southeast of Nauvoo, in Carthage, Ill. I arrived in the middle of a guided tour: 30 or 40 Mormon teens sat on the floor of a second-story room and listened to a husky, white-haired elder narrate the tragedy of Smith's last hours. The elder, using a walking stick to imitate the rifles of the mob, enacted the death scene with stagey gusto, but when the bloody climax came--Smith's disastrous fall from the building--he grew somber. "I personally think that when Joseph fell out that window, the Savior...