A bastion of Mormonism rises in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains
By Adelle M. Banks
Students and families gather outside Main Hall on the campus of Southern Virginia University for graduation May 3. The small school is 97 percent Mormon and located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Buena Vista, Va. Religion News Service photo courtesy Southern Virginia University.
BUENA VISTA, Va. -- Greg Larsen seems like your typical young Mormon: he was born and raised in Utah, served a two-year mission in San Antonio and is married -- at 23 -- to the woman he met as an undergrad at a Mormon university. Read the entire story
But the campus where he and his wife, Alyssa, met wasn't Brigham Young University in Utah. His newly minted degree comes from Southern Virginia University, a fledgling outpost of Mormonism in the heart of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.
The 12-year-old university is 97 percent Mormon in an area better…
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Church’s One (Moving) Foundation
OK, so the lyrics and the music are a tad cheesy, but the visuals are stunning:
h/t: Andrew Sullivan and Grant Montgomery
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Episcopal Monks (RNS2-APRIL03) Robert Sevensky, the prior at Mount Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara, Calif., looks out from the retreat's hilltop setting. For use with RNS-EPISCOPAL-MONKS, transmitted April 3, 2008.
Religion News Service photo by Ed Carreon.
John Witte is the director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Law School in Atlanta. Religion News Service photo courtesy of Emory University.
John Witte
By Andrea Useem
When Texas authorities raided a polygamous community belonging to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in early April and placed more than 400 children in state care, the event brought the long-simmering issues of polygamous communities to a boil. Following calls from Sen. Harry Reid, D-Utah, for Southwestern states to crack down on what he called "the epidemic of lawlessness in polygamous communities," a federal prosecutor has been appointed to work on the issue with Utah, Arizona and Nevada, where other communities practice polygamy.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has said that prosecuting consenting…