Aimee Semple McPherson and the Mormons -- an unlikely combination to be receiving lavish attention lately, both subjects of numerous new books, documentaries, and the like. The PBS documentary on McPherson -- featuring my friend Anthea Butler, a radiant talking head and new editor of The North Star: Journal of African American Religious History, alongside other scholars -- relies heavily on the biographies of McPherson by Edith Blumhofer (Everybody's Sister, an excellent book I reviewed for the Journal of Southern History), and the recent work Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Aimee's life (as 
viewed by Sutton) also gets reviewed by Caleb Crain in the New York Review of Books (subscription required); Crain supplements his article with some further interesting notes on Aimee's life here, and links to recordings of Aimee's voice here. Here locally in Colorado Springs, the rise and fall of Sister Aimee bears many resemblances to that of Ted Haggard of the New Life Church (albeit the "fall" part is more sordid and less amusing than Sister Aimee's). If you have J-STOR access, my review of Blumhofer's biography is here.
viewed by Sutton) also gets reviewed by Caleb Crain in the New York Review of Books (subscription required); Crain supplements his article with some further interesting notes on Aimee's life here, and links to recordings of Aimee's voice here. Here locally in Colorado Springs, the rise and fall of Sister Aimee bears many resemblances to that of Ted Haggard of the New Life Church (albeit the "fall" part is more sordid and less amusing than Sister Aimee's). If you have J-STOR access, my review of Blumhofer's biography is here.The PBS/Frontline four-hour series on Mormon history and culture is linked here; the film makes excellent use of religious/legal history scholars such as Sarah Barringer Gordon and Kathleen Flake and also features a sensitive discussion of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I'll post more another time about the plethora of excellent recent scholarly literature on the Latter-day Saints.
The theme here is the theatrical and the organizational, or perhaps the charismatic and the bureaucratic. It reminded me of a recent conversation with a relative concerning Fall's Creek Baptist Youth Assembly, the largest religious youth camp in the United States, located in Oklahoma. The music there is no longer reliant on Protestant hymnology, but instead has been converted into praise music bands, the now-standard megachurch style. The same goes for the praise music at the Estes Park YMCA camp where I recently attended a family reunion. Sister Aimee would have loved it.
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