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Inspired
Inspired is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality. Each week we offer you analyses of the big headlines alongside lesser-told stories – those of Orthodox Jewish artists and African-American atheists, Muslim feminists and spiritual seekers. Through these stories, a rough sketch of our country’s religious landscape begins to emerge. It’s a marketplace of beliefs and ideas too complex for sound bites, and too important to ignore.
Joseph Smith and the Theology of Polygamy
The Mormon revelation about plural marriage begins with an angel, as so many spiritual epiphanies do. As the telling goes, between 1834 and 1842, a heavenly being visited founder Joseph Smith three times to demand that he practice polygamy. Reluctantly, he agreed, and by the end of his life he would have as many as 40 wives. The church banned the practice in 1890, but in October of 2014, his many partners were officially acknowledged by the church for the first time. This story originally aired last November, right after the announcement. Featuring Jana Reiss, Mormon author and contributor to Religion News Service and Terryl Givens, scholar of the Mormon Church and professor of religion at the University of Richmond.
The Darger Family: Love Times Three
Picture this: it’s Sunday morning and your congregation of twenty-something people gathers for church. Except that the service is in your house, and all those people are your family. That’s a typical weekend for the Dargers, a Utah family of 27 who say they’re going back to the original teachings of Joseph Smith.
