CBH Talk | Claire Hoffman and Eliza Griswold Discuss “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson”
On a spring day in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. The nation’s most famous evangelist, Aimee was known as a sophisticated marketer who had used Hollywood magic and the newest technology to bring her message to the masses. Although Aimee’s Pentecostal beliefs were considered radical at the time, she soon made them mainstream. With her state-of-the art Christian radio station, she paved the way for the televangelists to come and shaped the very nature of American Christianity. Her massive Angelus Temple in Los Angeles could be called the first megachurch.
But as the crowds gathered at the water’s edge in 1926, people began to ask: who was this woman everyone thought they knew? Was she everybody’s saintly sister or a con artist and a sinner? The story of what happened next—the accusations of a sex scandal and religious persecution, two lengthy court inquiries, and the media race to cover it all is at the thrilling center of Sister, Sinner.
A riveting journey into the rise of popular religion in America and life in early Hollywood--told with the flavor of the period’s noir mysteries--Claire Hoffman’s Sister Sinner is an unforgettable story of an iconic woman who changed the world and shaped the future of American Christianity and then was forgotten. Join Hoffman in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and director of the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism at Princeton University, Eliza Griswold.
PARTICIPANTS
Claire Hoffman works as a journalist and author, reporting on culture, religion, celebrity, business, and whatever else seems interesting. Her first book, a memoir, Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood, was published in 2016 by Harper Collins. She was formerly a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone.
Eliza Griswold is the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction. Her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Eliza Griswold navigates the intersection of religion, art, the environment, and news. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University and is the Ferris Professor and Director of the Program in Journalism at Princeton University.
