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 ...

Why and how masses of people fall under the thrall of a magnetic person are the kinds of questions that sadly keep poking their, in the most recent case, oddly orange-tinged heads up far too often in ...

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. Aimee Semple McPherson built Los Angeles’ first megachurch and became nationally famous through Hollywood-style ...

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 ...

Our culture supports so many types of celebrity—online influencers, YouTube stars, Hollywood actors, reality-TV contestants—that it is easy to forget how recent this market saturation is. In the early ...

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 ...

Journalist Hoffman (Greetings from Utopia Park) offers a vivid biography of Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), an evangelical leader and radio pioneer whose ascendance to near-sainthood was shattered ...

When the influencer Katie Sorensen posted on Instagram about the less than “clean cut” Latino couple who she said tried to kidnap her children outside a Bay Area Michaels in 2020, she credited her ...

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 ...

Worship service at Angelus Temple during 14-hour Holy Ghost service led by Aimee Semple McPherson, Los Angeles, by Los Angeles Times on Wikimedia. Who built the first megachurch in the United States?

In “Sister, Sinner,” Claire Hoffman tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Aimee Semple McPherson, whose mysterious life made headlines in the 1920s. By Sarah Pulliam Bailey Raised in an evangelical ...