DiaBLOGue

Dear Heavenly Mother

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 167
I am encouraged by small changes, but change takes time. For now, I will speak your name. I will make you part of our eternal narrative. I will share your love and stop myself from looking past you. I will teach my children to see your light and be lifted by your strength, that they will speak your name as easily as they do Father’s—for both of you are part of their eternal makings.

A Woman Here

Podcast version of this piece. I try to strengthen my relationship with my Heavenly Mother, but I’m not always sure how. Some days I sing, “Heavenly Mother, are you really there? And do you hear…

Mothers and Authority

Podcast version of this piece. It was not in a grove of trees, and I did not see a pillar of light when I first communed with Heavenly Mother. Instead, I was lying crumpled on…

In Praise of Belly Buttons (four meditations)

Podcast version of this piece. [one] My belly is expanding. It is not as much as I had expected—nothing like the maternity models (who I suspect might not even be pregnant) who now populate my…

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

I Am a Child of Gods

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 99–118
Mormon feminists should consider how to better include intersex, nonbinary, and trans women in their ambitions. Queerness is more than homosexuality.

A Queer Heavenly Family: Expanding Godhood Beyond a Heterosexual, Cisgender Couple

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 69–98
Although the concept of Heavenly Mother is empowering for many women, the focus on God as a cisgender, heterosexual couple also limits who can see their own divinity reflected in the stories told about God. First, with Heavenly Mother as the only female divinity, divine expression of womanhood is restricted to motherhood. This excludes many women, including women struggling with infertility, women who do not wish to become mothers, and transgender women who experience motherhood differently than fertile, cisgender women.

In Defense of Heavenly Mother: Her Critical Importance for Mormon Culture and Theology

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 37
Marginalizing God the Mother does not solve the problems raised by Mormonism’s doctrine of divine and human embodiment. It merely diminishes femaleness as a reflection of divinity. We do not need fewer images to understand God; we need more. Critics of Heavenly Mother have not fully grasped the negative consequences of moving toward a God beyond gender

The Divine Feminine in Mormon Art

For the first century of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, members generally did not condone artistic renderings of deity, including those of Christ.[1] It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Mormon…