Claire Hoffman - Preachers, pretenders, and the price of belief
Podcast: Ye Gods With Scott CarterPublished On: Wed Sep 17 2025
Description: Claire Hoffman is a journalist, author, and a journalism professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her new book, Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson was hailed by The New Yorker’s Casey Cep as “magnificent,” “gripping”, and “wonderfully thorough, the type of biography in which you learn just the right amount of everything.” In her book, Claire dives into the story of how, for two months in 1926, Pentecostal superstar Sister Aimee’s disappearance from a Southern California beach dominated headlines across the world.Claire also grew up in the 1980’s and ‘90’s in Fairfield, Iowa - ground zero for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation movement in America. Since her parents were devout practitioners, Claire and her brother were raised also as meditators. She recounts her childhood experiences in her 2016 book, Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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