Los Angeles has always been a city that prefers reinvention to tradition, making it the ideal incubator for new religious movements. From the beginning, its distance from the centers of institutional ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Aimee Semple McPherson became a star evangelist while living in L.A. Despite a mysterious disappearance that tarnished her ...

She was a blend of P.T. Barnum, the colorful showman credited with declaring, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and the infamous flamboyant televangelist couple Tammy Faye and Jim Baker who built ...

Wearing a white dress with a blue cape and carrying roses, Aimee Semple McPherson walked to the microphone, smiled, greeted, and blessed her congregation. With her reddish hair and large, expressive ...

In Claire Hoffman’s first book, “Greetings From Utopia Park,” she describes growing up as a follower of Transcendental Meditation. Her second book, “Sister, Sinner” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a ...