Aimee Semple McPherson became a star evangelist while living in L.A. Despite a mysterious disappearance that tarnished her reputation in 1926, her legacy lives on in the city. (Bettmann Archive via ...

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 ...

Charismatic. Pioneering. Controversial. Aimee Semple McPherson was not an ordinary evangelist. With WWI and a deadly flu ...

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 ...

In an Oakland, Calif, hotel room one morning last week Aimee Semple McPherson, the most spectacular U.S. evangelist since Billy Sunday, died gasping in the arms of her son Rolf—a bottle of sleeping ...

Patrician London remained studiously unconscious, last week, that a female evangelist from California was preaching what she seemed to call her “Four Square Gospel” in famed Royal Albert Hall. Those ...

There are two kinds of Angelenos: Those who’ve heard of Aimee Semple McPherson and those who should. She was a showperson, a radio star, a publisher and writer, a beloved figure and a celebrity — hard ...