Download or read book Unraveling Polygamy written by Jay Allred and published by Jay Allred. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unraveling Polygamy: My Path Out" by Jay Allred tells the story of his life in a polygamous cult and his journey to break free. Born and raised in this closed community, Allred spent forty-six years living according to its strict rules, following the teachings of their leader. His life was filled with challenges, from managing multiple marriages to dealing with the stigma of polygamy and the struggles of his wives. Allred explains how his family joined the cult, leaving the mainstream LDS Church to follow a group that still practiced polygamy. He describes the control of cult leaders, the constant fear of being caught by the authorities, and the impact on his family. His story includes significant events like police raids and efforts to stop polygamy. Although deeply committed at first, Allred began to see the problems and unfairness in his beliefs. This led him to make the brave choice to leave the cult. His journey to freedom was one of self-discovery, building new relationships, and changing his view of the world. Allred's honest account offers a rare look into a hidden world, highlighting the strength needed to escape indoctrination and the power of the human spirit to seek freedom and true identity.
Download or read book Secrets and Wives written by Sanjiv Bhattacharya and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we really know about modern practicing polygamists--not fictional ones like the Henrickson family on HBO's Big Love? We've seen the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the news, the underage brides in pioneer dresses on a Texas ranch. But the FLDS is just one of many groups that have broken with mainstream Mormonism to follow those parts of Joseph Smith's doctrine disavowed by the LDS Church. Gaining unprecedented access to these communities, journalist Sanjiv Bhattacharya reveals a shadow country teeming with small town messiahs, dark secrets, and stories both heartbreaking and strange. Polygamy's dark side--incest, forced marriages, and physical abuse--is laid bare. But Bhattacharya also finds warmth in the fundamentalist diaspora and even finds himself taking an ideological stand for polygamy's legalization. More than just an expose of Mormon polygamy, Secrets and Wives is the personal journey of a foreign atheist and liberal, a stranger in a strange land who grapples with hard questions about marriage, monogamy, and the very nature of faith.
Download or read book The Book of Mormon Girl written by Joanna Brooks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From her days of feeling like “a root beer among the Cokes”—Coca-Cola being a forbidden fruit for Mormon girls like her—Joanna Brooks always understood that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set her apart from others. But, in her eyes, that made her special; the devout LDS home she grew up in was filled with love, spirituality, and an emphasis on service. With Marie Osmond as her celebrity role model and plenty of Sunday School teachers to fill in the rest of the details, Joanna felt warmly embraced by the community that was such an integral part of her family. But as she grew older, Joanna began to wrestle with some tenets of her religion, including the Church’s stance on women’s rights and homosexuality. In 1993, when the Church excommunicated a group of feminists for speaking out about an LDS controversy, Joanna found herself searching for a way to live by the leadings of her heart and the faith she loved. The Book of Mormon Girl is a story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Joanna’s journey through her faith explores a side of the religion that is rarely put on display: its humanity, its tenderness, its humor, its internal struggles. In Joanna’s hands, the everyday experience of being a Mormon—without polygamy, without fundamentalism—unfolds in fascinating detail. With its revelations about a faith so often misunderstood and characterized by secrecy, The Book of Mormon Girl is a welcome advocate and necessary guide.
Download or read book Committed written by Elizabeth Gilbert and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling follow-up to Eat Pray Love—an intimate and erudite celebration of love from the author of Big Magic and City of Girls. At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous bad divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which-after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing-gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. Told with Gilbert's trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed attempts to "turn on all the lights" when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities. Gilbert's memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.
Download or read book Polygamy s Rape of Rachael Strong written by John R. Llewellyn and published by Agreka Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents a recent case history of a Mormon Fundamentalist polygamist. Rachael Strong was raped by her polygamist prophet stepfather who claims he was only living his religion, by a published doctrine that warns: submit or be destroyed by God, and ultimately by a Utah movement to decriminalize polygamy. (Legal Reference/Law)
Download or read book Answer Them Nothing written by Debra Weyermann and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When police raided the Short Creek compound of the Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1953, it soon became a political and publicity nightmare and eventually cost the governor of Arizona his job. From that point on, skittish public officials allowed the polygamist sect to practice its tenants unmolested for the next 50 years and turned a blind eye to child abandonment, kidnapping, statutory rape, incest, and massive tax and welfare fraud. But then Warren Jeffs, a new FLDS prophet, escalated the sect's crimes to near madness. Activists watched in horror as he used his limitless authority and the resources of a tax-supported community—in essence, a feudal empire on the Utah/Arizona border—to devastate thousands of lives on cruel whims, marrying girls as young as 11 to 60-year-old men and driving off teenage “lost boys” who Jeffs felt threatened his authority. Answer Them Nothing is the chilling story of the victims, activists, prosecutors, judges, cops, and attorneys who in 2001 began the struggle to dismantle the FLDS empire and bring Jeffs and his henchmen to justice. It is a mesmerizing journey into one of America's darkest corners, a story that stretches over three states and deep into history of the powerful Mormon Church.
Download or read book Focus on African Films written by Françoise Pfaff and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-13 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Focus on African Films' offers pluralistic perspectives on filmmaking across Africa, highlighting the distinct thematic, stylistic, and socioeconomic circumstances of African film production.
Download or read book Legalizing Gay Marriage written by Michael Mello and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lessons from the first states to grapple with gay marriage legislation.
Download or read book Fela Anikulapo Kuti written by Adeshina Afolayan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fela Anikulapo Kuti was the Afrobeat music maestro whose life and time provide the lens through which we can outline the postcolonial trajectory of the Nigerian state as well as the dynamics of most other African states. Through the Afrobeat music, Fela did not only challenge consecutive governments in Nigeria, but his rebellious Afrobeat lyrics facilitate a philosophical subtext that enriches the more intellectual Afrocentric discourses. Afrobeat and the philosophy of blackism that Fela enunciated place him right beside Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and all the others who champion a black and African mode of being in the world. This book traces the emergence of Fela on the music scene, the cultural and political backgrounds that made Afrobeat possible, and the philosophical elements that not only contributed to the formation of Fela's blackism, but what constitutes Fela's philosophical sensibility too.
Download or read book The Marriage Buyout written by Cynthia Lee Starnes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From divorce court to popular culture, alimony is a dirty word. Unpopular and rarely ordered, the awards are frequently inconsistent and unpredictable. The institution itself is often viewed as an historical relic that harkens back to a gendered past in which women lacked the economic independence to free themselves from economic support by their spouses. In short, critics of alimony claim it has no place in contemporary visions of marriage as a partnership of equals. But as Cynthia Lee Starnes argues in The Marriage Buyout, alimony is often the only practical tool for ensuring that divorce does not treat today’s primary caregivers as if they were suckers. Her solution is to radically reconceptualize alimony as a marriage buyout. Starnes’s buyouts draw on a partnership model of marriage that reinforces communal norms of marriage, providing a gender-neutral alternative to alimony that assumes equality in spousal contribution, responsibility, and right. Her quantification formulae support new default rules that make buyouts more certain and predictable than their current alimony counterparts. Looking beyond alimony, Starnes outlines a new vision of marriages with children, describing a co-parenting partnership between committed couples, and the conceptual basis for income sharing between divorced parents of minor children. Ultimately, under a partnership model, the focus of alimony is on gain rather than loss and equality rather than power: a spouse with disparately low earnings isn’t a sucker or a victim dependent on a fixed alimony payment, but rather an equal stakeholder in marriage who is entitled at divorce to share any gains the marriage produced.
Download or read book Polygamy s Rights and Wrongs written by Gillian Calder and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assumptions about the harmful nature of polygamy have left little room for debate, with monogamy coming to represent a hallmark of civil society, and polygamy the immoral alternative. Opponents have argued that polygamy is harmful to women, children, personal freedom, and even national values, and press for prosecution. Yet in this volume, eleven scholars ask whether this response is justified by examining, among other perspectives, the lived experiences of polygamous families. In essays that fearlessly explore difficult questions of love, choice, and dignity, these historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars, some of whom are personally connected to polygamous families, seek to complicate a conversation that is more often simplified. Thoughtful and persuasive, Polygamy’s Rights and Wrongs is both a close consideration of polygamy -- its historical place and its presence in contemporary society -- and a challenging reflection on the ways in which we value family and intimacy.
Download or read book Joseph Smith s Polygamy Volume 3 Theology written by Brian C. Hales and published by Greg Kofford Books. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans of Joseph Smith’s day, steeped in the stories and prophecies of the King James Bible, certainly knew about plural marriage; but it was a curiosity relegated to the misty past of patriarchs Abraham and Jacob, who never gave reasons for their polygamy. It was long abandoned, Christians understood, by the time Jesus set forth the dominating law of the New Testament. But how did Joseph Smith understand it? Where did it fit in the “restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21) predicted in the New Testament? What part did it play in the global ideology declared by this modern prophet who produced new scripture, new revelation, and new theology? During Joseph Smith’s lifetime, polygamy was taught and practiced in intense secrecy, with the result that he never fully explained its doctrinal underpinnings or systematized its practice. As a result, reconstructing Joseph Smith’s theology of plurality is a task that has seldom been undertaken. Most theological examinations have either focused on its development during Brigham Young’s Utah period, with its need to resist increasing federal legislative and judicial pressures, or the efforts of twentieth-century and contemporary “fundamentalists” who continue to marry a plurality of wives. Volume 3 of this three-volume work builds on the carefully reconstructed history of the development of Mormon polygamy during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, then assembles the doctrinal principles from his recorded addresses, the diary entries of those closely associated with him, and his broader teachings on the related topics of obedience to God’s will, marriage and family relations, and the mechanics of eternal progression, salvation, and exaltation. The revelation he dictated in July 1843 that authorized the practice of eternal and plural marriage receives unprecedented examination and careful interpretation that illuminate this significant document and its underlying doctrines. Attempts to explain the history of Joseph Smith’s polygamy without comprehending the theological principles undergirding its practice will always be incomplete and skewed. This volume, which takes those principles and evidences with the utmost seriousness, has produced the most important explanation of “why” this ancient practice reemerged among the Latter-day Saints on the shores of the Mississippi in the early 1840s.
Download or read book Eat Pray Love written by Elizabeth Gilbert and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-03-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Number One international bestseller, Eat, Pray Love is a journey around the world, a quest for spiritual enlightenment and a story for anyone who has battled with divorce, depression and heartbreak.
Download or read book Daughter of the Saints Growing Up in Polygamy written by Dorothy Allred Solomon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-10-17 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Probably the best book ever written about polygamy. Neither an apologia nor an exposé."—Salt Lake City Tribune "I am the daughter of my father's fourth plural wife, twenty-eighth of forty-eight children—a middle kid, you might say." So begins this astonishing and poignant memoir of life in the family of Utah fundamentalist leader and naturopathic physician Rulon C. Allred. Since polygamy was abolished by manifesto in 1890, this is a story of secrecy and lies, of poverty and imprisonment and government raids. When raids threatened, the families were forced to scatter from their pastoral compound in Salt Lake City to the deserts of Mexico or the wilds of Montana. To follow the Lord's plan as dictated by the Principle, the human cost was huge. Eventually murder in its cruelest form entered when members of a rival fundamentalist group assassinated the author's father. Dorothy Solomon, monogamous herself, broke from the fundamentalist group because she yearned for equality and could not reconcile the laws of God (as practiced by polygamists) with the vastly different laws of the state. This poignant account chronicles her brave quest for personal identity. Originally published in hardcover under the title Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk.
Download or read book Unravel your Hidden Gems written by Tolu' A. Akinyemi and published by The Roaring Lion Newcastle LTD. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unravel your Hidden Gems is a collection of inspirational and motivational essays from the heart of the acclaimed author, Tolu' A. Akinyemi. Released hot on the heels of Tolu's first book of poetry, Dead Lions Don't Roar, this new book is a study on Life, encouraging people to succeed at what they feel is important to their own happiness. Be it private life, business, religion, career, or relationships, each part of life is discovered. This mind-altering life manual can be read as a whole or visited in snippets for day to day inspiration. Each essay examines and highlights challenges in life and how to succeed in enjoying life with grace. A self-help study on life with a refreshing difference, the book is a totality of life's journey, reminding us we are here on a temporary basis and that it is our duty to not hide in obscurity, but to Unravel Your Hidden Gems before it is too late! Pure Inspiration!
Download or read book Nauvoo Polygamy written by George Dempster Smith and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mormon Mormon polygamy began in Nauvoo, Illinois, a river town located at a bend in the Mississippi about fifty miles upstream from Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri. After church founder Joseph Smith married some thirty-eight women, he introduced this "celestial" form of marriage to his innermost circle of followers. By early 1846, nearly 200 men had adopted the polygamous lifestyle, with an average of nearly four women per man--717 wives in all. After leaving Nauvoo, these husbands would eventually marry another 417 women. In Utah they were the polygamy pioneers who provided a model for thousands of others who entered into plural marriages in the nineteenth century. Their story is colorful, wrapped in images of people in the next life piloting celestial worlds. Plural marriage was not initiated all at once, nor was it introduced though a smooth progression of events but rather in fits and starts, though defenses and denials, hubris and mea culpas. The story, as told here, emphasizes the human drama, interspersed with underlying historiographical issues of uncovering what has hidden--of explaining behavior that was once allowed and then denied as circumstances changed.
Download or read book Gay and Lesbian Families written by Kate Burns and published by Greenhaven Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2005 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gay and lesbian families share many traits with other families, but unique differences merit special consideration. This anthology investigates key issues related to gay and lesbian families including gay parenting, marriage laws, gay children and teens, adoption policies, and religious viewpoints in the United States and Canada.
