Word: prophet
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Back in Malibu it seemed like just another chanting, channeling new-age religion. But under the big skies of Montana, where Elizabeth Clare Prophet moved her Church Universal and Triumphant in 1986, the newcomers struck the locals as ominous. Starting out on a 12,000-acre ranch purchased five years earlier from publisher Malcolm Forbes for $7.7 million, the church rapidly expanded its holdings to 33,500 acres, attracted some 1,000 followers to the region, and launched extensive construction projects. Neighbors feared that the mushrooming community might damage the delicate ecological balance of Yellowstone National Park, which the ranch...
Last week Prophet, 50, who is also known as Guru Ma, and her husband Ed Francis, 39, appeared before a grand jury investigating alleged church involvement in illegal arms gathering. Prophet denies any wrongdoing, but if evidence implicates the two, they will face possible jail sentences and the crumbling of their empire. Says Park County commissioner Larry Lovely: "I think their credibility is slipping, and it's time to get this out in the open...
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the usual operations have been neglected while Prophet and her followers gear up for surviving the Armageddon she predicted in 1987, when she received a message from what she calls her "ascended masters." This exalted band includes Jesus, Buddha and Guru Ma's former husband the late Mark L. Prophet, who three decades ago founded the religion on an amalgam of Christianity and Eastern faiths...
...platform. Unlike Sunni Muslims, members of Islam's other, much larger branch, Shi'ites believe in an intermediary between God and man. In Shi'ism's first centuries, this role of mediator was played by the Twelve Imams, who were thought to be the rightful successors to the Prophet Muhammad and who combined religious and secular authority. Most Shi'ites continue to believe that the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared in A.D. 940, will one day emerge from hiding to establish a purified Islamic state. Some Iranians hailed Khomeini as an Imam qualified to be the deputy...
...furor over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses-which many say blasphemes the prophet Mohammed and which she eventually banned--has also helped destablized her regime. problem of Afghan refugees and an ensuing drug trade. And Bhutto has said she hopes to depend on U.S. help with these problems...