DiaBLOGue

Lithium Shuffle

Down the streettrusties from the state hospitalfollowing the horizon of their noon shadows,their feet scooping up the sidewalk,the fastest as slow as the slowest.The sun is on them and pitiless.If we, shaded neighborson the other…

heavy seeds

. . . they buried the weapons of war, for peace. Alma 24:19 bury seeds these      with covenant gritshrill songs on our lips      as we circle the pit clank seeds clanging      as we cry-file bybeg,…

She Simply Wanted More: Mormon Women and Excommunication

Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 109–123
As an adult, I learned that 1993 represented a kind of death for members of the Mormon studies community. Since the 1970s, Latter-day Saint women had been challenging the limited role the Church provided for female spirituality.

Mormon Dissent in the Age of Fracture

When fifteen hundred progressive Mormons attended Sunstone Symposium in August 1992, they did so in protest. The symposium had become a center point in the growing battle between Latter-day Saint leaders and activists, especially as…

The September Six and the Evolution of Mormon Magisteria

In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould published a short essay aimed at limning the conflict between science and religion, particularly with respect to the question of evolution as the mechanism of generating life on Earth. In…

The September Six and the Lost Generation of Mormon Studies

I was a high school senior in September 1993, when Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides were disfellowshipped or excommunicated from the Church of Jesus…

A Question of Authority

I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 25, 1993, almost immediately after Lavina Fielding Anderson was forced out of it.[1] Her stake disciplinary council had convened on September…