A December Poem
April 16, 2025Under the dome above, we look up,
singing children’s canticles,
our own domed hearts
clutched by the promise
DiaBLOGue
O Utah, Where’s Your Shame!: A Review ofTwo Mountain Meadows Massacre Books | Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Barbara Jones Brown, Vengeance Is Mine, and Janiece Johnson, Convicting the Mormons
April 16, 2025The Mountain Meadows Massacre is a hugely important (and hugely tragic) topic in the history of both Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That is why it is so notable that…
Invigorating the Latter-day Saint Pioneer Woman Narrative | Martine Leavitt, Buffalo Flats
April 16, 2025“Rebecca had heard her father and others call this land God’s country often enough that she wasn’t as surprised as she might have been to come upon him, one warm spring evening, sitting on the…
The Power of Three: A Trio of Poetsand Mormon Feminist Poetics | Heather Harris-Bergevin, Katabasis; Susan Elizabeth Howe, Infinite Disguises; and Darlene Young, Here
April 16, 2025In her introduction to her book Katabasis, Heather Harris-Bergevin quotes someone who accused her at one time of “consorting with witches.” The word “witch” comes from an Old English “wicce,” meaning “female magician or sorceress.”…
A Brush with Mormonism’s Ghosts | Mason Kamana Allred, Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism
April 16, 2025Media scholars, take note: Mason Kamana Allred’s Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism is a haunting must-read that will leave you ghost hunting across other lanes of media history. After pointing…
Contextualizing and Chronicling the Lives of Enslaved People in Utah Territory | Amy Tanner Thiriot, Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847–1862
April 16, 2025Genealogical research has long played a prominent role in the theology and lived religious experiences of individuals, families, and communities associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Given this reality, one…
Ressurrection and Judgment
April 16, 2025Good morning. It is an honor to speak to you today on the holiest of Sabbaths, when we come together to celebrate the resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Easter is, of course, a day of rejoicing. The events of Holy Week leading up to Easter—Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane and the Crucifixion—all lead inexorably to the joyful conclusion that “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”
Unveiling the Invisible Hand of Providence: Examining the Smith Family’s Economic and Spiritual Catalysts Amid Troubling Times and the Panic of 1819
April 16, 2025Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.—William S. Burroughs (1914–1997)[1] Joseph Smith ascended to the revered position of…
Armenians and The Church of Jesus Christ ofLatter-day Saints: A Hauntological Exhibit
April 16, 2025From 1986 to 1993, I was history curator at the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the spring and summer of 1993, I was preparing an exhibit on the…
Handcart Apostasy
April 16, 2025My grandma was a collector. Of dolls, spoons, PEZ dispensers. When she died six years ago, all ten of her children were able to redistribute her hundreds of lovingly collected Nativity sets representing dozens of…