Brattle Street Elegy: Treasures
March 17, 2018I started attending the chapel at 4 Longfellow Park in 1969 when I was a freshman at Wellesley College. It was my introduction to Mormon life, since I had joined the Church in Illinois at…
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Brattle Street Elegy: Anchored with Meaning
March 17, 2018This church building has heard so many songs and souls. It has witnessed so much painful and redemptive spiritual journeying. Freud and Darwin were welcomed right along with the Three Witnesses. In the chapel I…
Truman G. Madsen: A Glimpse from the Extended Family
March 17, 2018On the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Truman Madsen wrote my grandmother, Dessie Grant Boyle, a very long letter. She had raised Truman after his mother (and her sister), Emily Grant Madsen, died shortly after…
Truman Madsen, Architect
March 17, 2018Truman Madsen was a speaker extraordinaire, one of the finest orators in the Church, able to speak extemporaneously in a captivating voice. Alert to his audience, he was able to thread the pieces of his…
Four Reasons for Voting Yes
March 17, 2018I don’t live in California, and so the questions of what I thought of Proposition 8 and of my Church’s involvement in it were never presented to me with any more force than that of…
The Political Is Personal
March 17, 2018As a California native, I have a stake in my home state’s politics, especially on social issues such as same-sex marriage. I was living in Pasadena, California, in 2000 when Proposition 22, defining marriage as…
An Evangelical Perspective
March 17, 2018As an evangelical Christian living in California, I had mixed feelings about the Christian community’s involvement in Proposition 8. I had just started attending a new church during election time. One Sunday, I was handed…
How We Talk about Marriage (and Why It Matters)
March 17, 2018A decade from now, same-sex marriage will likely be the law in a majority of states. Given the domino effect of legislatures embracing a cause that has successfully claimed the mantle of equality, coupled with…
The Church’s Use of Secular Arguments
March 17, 2018One fascinating development in the Proposition 8 debate in California was the extent to which secular arguments-involving legal, political, and sociological claims-came to take center stage, even in announcements from the Church itself. The Church’s…
Two Modes of Political Engagement
March 17, 2018The hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which in November 2008 rescinded the legal right to marriage for same-sex couples in California, is evidence of an important political success for religious conservative political groups who support…