{"id":3390,"date":"2026-01-01T16:49:50","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3390"},"modified":"2026-01-01T16:49:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:49:50","slug":"review-sister-sinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3390","title":{"rendered":"Review: Sister, Sinner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Sister, Sinner<\/em> is the a biography of a sort I don&#8217;t see often enough.  Claire Hoffman picked someone who cries out for biography and walks through that life in a lively way without putting making it too obvious to the reader what she thinks.  I am impressed that she can make me very interested in Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, realize that she is a very important figure in the history of America, of Los Angeles, and in the history of Religion in America, and still let me decide what I think of all that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McPherson (Semple McPherson?  And there&#8217;s another husband in there later&#8230; I&#8217;ll stick with McPherson) definitely led a life.  She built a Pentecostal church out of fervor and charisma.  Then using the mass media of the time &#8211; radio and newsletters &#8211; made it a nationwide church movement.  And then there is either a kidnapping or a faked kidnapping.  And then Los Angeles politics gets involved.  And when it all seems to die down McPherson refuses to let it.  It is a wild story just in the facts of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hoffman digs in.  Everything she describes is well sourced.  McPherson was a celebrity of the day on a par with British royalty or Hollywood stars, so there is copious contemporaneous news coverage as well as detailed church records and some tell-all books. Hoffman sifts it all into a narrative, but leaves the ambiguities there for the reader to weigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sister, Sinner is the a biography of a sort I don&#8217;t see often enough. Claire Hoffman picked someone who cries out for biography and walks through that life in a lively way without putting making it too obvious to the reader what she thinks. I am impressed that she can make me very interested in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3391,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3390\/revisions\/3391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}