It’s Time We Began: Race, Relationships, and the Life of the Church Now (Part 1)

The Dialogue Foundation and the University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies program present “It’s Time We Began: Race, Relationships, and the Life of the Church Now” recorded live on April 25, 2026 in Arlington, Virginia, as part of our continuing “All Are Alike Unto God” series. In this first part, moderator Laurie Maffly-Kipp digs deep into what W. Paul Reeve and Alice Faulkner Bush believe are ways church members can dispel myths about the priesthood and temple ban and use the scriptures to combat current racism.

W. Paul Reeve is the Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies and former chair of the History Department at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history, and the history of the U.S. West. He is Project Manager and General Editor of an award-winning digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to name and identify all known Black Latter-day Saints baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930. Reeve is also the author of multiple award-winning books, including Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, (Oxford, 2015) and co-author of This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford, 2024).
Alice Faulkner Burch is a historian of the Black American experience in Utah and the American West, and is the editor of My Lord He Calls Me: Stories of Faith By Black American Latter-day Saints (Deseret Book, 2022). She serves on the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board and the Utah chapter of the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society. As part of their commitment to making Utah a better place for Black Americans, Alice and her husband, Robert Burch, co-founded the Sema Hadithi African American Heritage and Culture Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to researching, preserving, and teaching Utah’s Black American history.