1129: Amber Scorah - Leaving the Witness: Exiting Religion and Finding a Life

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2019

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Join us now for today's Mormon Stories Podcast episode as we interview ex-Jehovah's Witness Amber Scorah about her new book: "Leaving the Witness: Exiting Religion and Finding a Life." Building off of our previous interview with former Jehovah's Witness, Lloyd Evans, we continue to discover the parallels between the JW Movement and Mormonism, particularly surrounding the struggle to form a new identity after leaving the religion. In this interview Amber shares her experience leaving her religion. From the book's abstract:

"Amber's loss of faith culminated in her own personal apocalypse, the only kind of ending possible for a Jehovah's Witness.

Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Amber was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had only known from the periphery--with no education or support system. A coming of age story of a woman already in her thirties, this unforgettable memoir examines what it's like to start one's life over again with an entirely new identity. It follows Scorah to New York City, where a personal tragedy forces her to look for new ways to find meaning in the absence of religion. With compelling, spare prose, Leaving the Witness traces the bittersweet process of starting over, when everything one's life was built around is gone."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support
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0:49.2	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John
0:54.7	DeLin. It is June 6, 2019 and I could not be more excited to have with us today another epic
1:03.6	amazing phenomenal authoring guest. Those of you who are followers of Mormon Stories podcast will
1:10.8	remember a few epic interviews that we've had over the past couple of years with with never Mormons.
1:16.9	We call them never mose in our community. One is Tova Marvus who wrote that amazing book,
1:21.4	The Book of Separation about being an Orthodox Jew, Luzi Urfei, being in a mixed faith marriage,
1:26.0	leaving her husband. That was an amazing book. We brought her to Salt Lake City. We also had the
1:32.1	privilege of interviewing Tara Westover about her amazing book, Educated,
1:36.8	brought her to Salt Lake City as well. And now we have the chance to interview Amber Scora
1:44.8	about her brand new book, Hot Off the Press, leaving the witness, exiting a religion and finding a
1:53.6	life. We interviewed Lloyd Evans a couple weeks ago about his Jehovah's Witness experience. But
2:00.4	Amber's book is going to take our understanding of the Jehovah's Witness movement to a new level.
2:06.6	So we're thrilled to have her today. We're thrilled to have several many, many people joining us live
2:12.4	on Facebook. And so with that, I need you further ado, Amber Scora, welcome to Mormon Stories podcast.
2:18.7	Thanks, John. I'm really happy to be here. We had a false start. So thanks for your patience.
2:23.7	Happy to be here again. All right. So many of our listeners will have had a bit of an introduction
	...

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