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What do you carry with you on your spiritual journey—and what carries you? In this episode of Dialogue Out Loud, Charlotte Hansen Terry, personal voices editor at Dialogue, speaks with two writers whose essays in the Spring 2025 issue explore faith, loss, and the divine feminine in deeply personal terms.
In “Handcart Apostasy,” Emma Tueller Stone weaves memoir, theology, and cultural critique to reflect on what it means to leave—and sometimes return to—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Drawing on the metaphor of her grandmother’s handcart-like collecting, Stone examines the emotional and spiritual weight of memory, identity, and chosen family. With honesty and grace, she challenges narrow narratives of apostasy and return, proposing instead a model of spiritual wandering that honors ambiguity, love, and the sacred things we carry with us.
In “God Looks Like Me,” Amelia Hollingsworth recounts a transformative encounter with sacred art on a rare child-free trip to Europe. Moved by depictions of Mary as a real, embodied mother—visible, powerful, and holy—Hollingsworth finds in the cathedrals of Europe what she often cannot find in her own religious tradition: a reflection of her divine worth. Her essay becomes both a plea and a vision for a Church that makes room for women, mothers, and the feminine face of God.
Together, Stone and Hollingsworth invite us to reimagine faith not as a fixed destination but as an unfolding path—where memory, art, doubt, motherhood, and longing can all be holy.
Dialogue Out Loud is produced and edited by Daniel Foster Smith.