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The Provo Tabernacle and Interfaith Collaboration

October 26, 2018

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. 

Mormons Probably Aren’t Materialists

October 26, 2018

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.

Can Mormons be White in America?

October 26, 2018

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?

Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 2: Ordinances, Quorums, Nonpriesthood Authority, Presiding, Priestesses, and Priesthood Bans

October 26, 2018

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).

Thoughts on Latino Mormons, Their Afterlife, and the Need for a New Historical Paradigm for Saints of Color

October 26, 2018

The following thoughts come from my experience as a faithful and ortho dox Latter-day Saint, as a Mormon bishop, as a critic of some aspects of institutionalized Mormonism, and as an activist and scholar of faith navigating what is and has been for most of my life a complicated environment where racial/ethnic issues are ever present but rarely discussed in ways that bring closure. My particular scholarship and activism on behalf of Mexicans and Latinos is encapsulated within this setting and I admit that I have not been freed from the complication that it brings to my faith except for those moments when I immerse myself in those Latino Mormon spaces that are my Spanish-language barrios (wards).

“Infected With Doubt”: An Empirical Overview of Belief and Non-Belief in Contemporary American Mormonism

October 26, 2018

Daniel, twenty-eight, is an active Church member and temple worker who served a mission and now holds a calling as a young single adult representative for his stake. He says he has both seen and performed miracles, and has a strong belief in Jesus Christ. But he has also struggled at times with doubt, which he says has “come along in many different forms” throughout his adult life.

Thoughts on Lane Twitchell

October 26, 2018

The German painter Gerhard Richter once wrote: “I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself, and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent).” Lane Twitchell is an artist whose particular skillset produces immense works that are both furiously energized and so stylistically distinctive that one could recognize one of his paintings even if obscured by the most impervious haze the Wasatch Front is capable of generating. By contrast, Lane also sometimes makes pictures that self-consciously eschew “style” with a commitment very likely borne of his first direct encounter with Richter’s work, visiting a Virginia gallery a missionary for his natal religious tradition in the mid 1980s. So Lane works in two very different but not unrelated modes, each tied in its own way to his distinctive creative tools. Lane’s work is ferociously intelligent, frenzied, brimming with ideas, occasionally political, and above all a sheer pleasure to look at.

What Does It Mean to Be Truly Christian?

October 26, 2018

The bishop is taking a risk letting me speak because I have a reputation of being a bit different, but he has reviewed my talk and doesn’t think I’ll do much damage. I have also…

When Feminists Excommunicate

October 26, 2018

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 183–192
I am concerned about the ways in which I see patriarchy swallow up the demands of feminism and use them against women. Each time we gain som