William Jankowiak’s book Illicit Monogamy provides an in-depth look at the intricacies of life in plural families within a specific fundamentalist Mormon community referred to as Angel Park. His work is monumental for its analysis…
I didn’t open it for a few months after receiving I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders. I had been delighted when asked to review it, but when the time came, anxiety overwhelmed me. I knew I would see myself in this book in an intimate, painful way, even though many of the narratives don’t directly reflect my own lived experiences. It was clear that reading this anthology of essays would make me feel vulnerable, striking close to my little queer heart, but I knew it would be healing to feel seen.
“I am finally no longer asked to believe in things for which not only is there no evidence, but which the evidence strongly condemns on fair inspection. . . . Let me be clear: I believe in God,…
For Mormonism’s nearly two-century existence, few subjects have brought it more into the public spotlight than polygamy. Most writers and scholars have focused on Joseph Smith as they told this story. Until Todd Compton came…
When I picked up William V. Smith’s The King Follett Sermon: A Biography, I was expecting to find a history of the text of the famous sermon from April 1844. I found that it was…
The life of Maurine Whipple, lauded Mormon author of the 1941 novel The Giant Joshua, is one of the saddest stories in LDS literature. She loved her people, the tough and hardscrabble settlers of St.…
When the Dialogue office moved from Stanford to Los Angeles, it found a home in the University Religious Conference, which was kitty-corner from the UCLA School of Dentistry, where I was a student. Occasionally, I…
When I received a copy of Dialogue volume 8 in the spring of 1973, my mind was immersed in Watergate, Vietnam, and civil rights. Lester Bush’s article on the evolution of a policy relative to…
Those of you who have paid attention along the way know quite a bit about Lester’s 1973 article, particularly because of the follow-up article he published in the Journal of Mormon History in 1999 that…
On this the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lester E. Bush’s landmark Dialogue article “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” I, along with other knowledgeable students of Mormon studies, gratefully acknowledge the crucial role…