In her diary entry for March 20, 1848, Patty Bartlett Sessions (1795–1892) recorded an unusual note: she had begun to work on her sewing sampler, an item she had not touched for thirty-eight years. She writes simply, “commenced to finish my sampler that I began when I was a girl and went to school.”
One of the happy surprises that makes history so interesting is the fact that Utah ever became Mormon Country, for during the roughly one hundred years before 1847 it had been, if anything, Catholic Country. Catholic explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, and traders had repeatedly plied their trades back and forth through the territory. Brigham Young University historian Ted J. Warner offers an intriguing speculation as to what might have happened if the Franciscan friars Dominguez and Escalante had been able to fulfill their promise to the Indians at Utah Lake that they would return and establish a mission among them.
As an offering in speculative theology, this paper reconsiders the current normative understanding of a male-only priesthood as presented in the Book of Mormon, specifically in Alma 13:1–20, and proposes that Alma presents a more capacious model. While this text is generally accepted as supporting the establishment and practice of a male-only priesthood (and a model of the Melchizedek Priesthood), I argue that Alma’s message was meant to expand the role of priesthood in society and to provide a way for an entire community to enter into a life of holiness.The exegesis that this paper presents is not simply an attempt to bring women into the conversation but to expand the conversation for the entire community—the community of all believers: men, women, and the rest of us.
The Pauline image of the body of Christ provides us with a gorgeous image that every part of the Church as it is expressed through the diverse cultures abroad are vital for its proper functioning. Bonhoeffer enlivens this image by suggesting that “Christ exists as community,”and to my mind there is no one cultural community that is the vital organ for the whole body. Rather, the conditions for a living church are that all of its diverse parts are working, honored, and respected.
In opposition to Christian traditions that teach human guilt as a result of original sin, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that humans “will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.”Unlike the Lutheran simul justus et peccator, wherein human beings are thoroughly sinful and saved only by God’s mercy, Mormons believe that human agency is responsible for human sinfulness and that the same agency is required to do good works for which we are ultimately judged.
Brigham Young University made headlines in 2012 for a series of controversies that would be, to say the least, unusual on most college campuses: a student-led push for the university to sell caffeinated beverages at student vending locations. Although a staple throughout the United States, caffeinated sodas had long been restricted from sale at BYU due to “lack of demand,” according to university officials.Five years later, however, caffeinated soda was, at last, approved for sale on BYU’s campus.
In October of 1996, Father William Flegge and his St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a problem. Renovations had left their beautiful Spanish Mission–style building unsafe for the high volume of parishioners expected for the upcoming Christmas services. That was when Father Flegge telephoned LDS Church headquarters to ask if Christmas Mass could be held at the Provo Tabernacle. In addition to welcoming Father Flegge and his flock to the tabernacle, LDS leaders invited them to bring into the tabernacle whatever sacred dress, objects, and symbols they needed to realize this important ceremony.Julie Boerio-Goates, pastoral coordinator for the parish, had plenty of experience staging Mass in the three-hundred-seat St. Francis building but was nervous about staging it in the two-thousand-seat tabernacle. The parish moved a lot of materials necessary for Christmas Mass from the St. Francis church, but since the tabernacle was so much bigger than St. Francis, more set dressing was needed. Serendipitously, seminarian Patrick Elliot had just been assigned to the parish as an assistant. Elliot had a good eye and knew where to find additional decorations. On December 24, two Christmas Masses were held in the evening and one at midnight.These services provide a vivid illustration of the Provo Tabernacle’s use for interfaith cooperation.
My mission was a complicated time for me. I was a Harvard undergradu ate, newly theist but uncertainly Mormon, and I was living in southern Louisiana. I’d been a strident atheist for years before a conversion at age eighteen, and I’d managed to keep myself separated from much of folk Mormon belief, even as my family and I had been supported by wonderful Mormon folk in 1980s Davis County, Utah. I was finding my way to faith in the miserable, wet poverty of southern Louisiana, but it was a faith inflected by my lifelong skepticism and general readerliness.
The emerging field of whiteness studies in the US asks some provocative questions: How do outsiders lay claim to citizenship? How do minorities shed their image as un-American? How do they, in other words, become white, with all the economic, political, and social privileges associated with that status?
Dialogue 51.1 (Spring 2018): 167–180
In the prequel to this article, I discussed in general contours the dual nature of authority—individual and institutional—and how the modern LDS concept of priesthood differs significantly from the ancient version in that it has become an abstract form of authority that can be “held” (or withheld, as the case might be).