DiaBLOGue

Excommunication and Finding Wholeness

April 24, 2021

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 69–79
Five years after my excommunication, I met and entered into a relationship with the man who is my husband to this day. We became a couple in 1991; we held a public commitment ceremony in 1995, a time when same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the United States; we purchased a home together in 1996; and we legally married in California in 2008. Regardless of how or why I was excommunicated in 1986, current Church policy is such that if I were a member, my bishop would have grounds for excommunicating me now, and I cannot currently be reinstated into membership.

Called Not to Serve

April 24, 2021

My brain is slightly broken. The natural lows and highs of life are amplified by chemical imbalance into deep emotional troughs and crazed manic waves that can strike anytime and for any reason. I also experience what are called “mixed states,” where I feel both depression and mania simultaneously. My brain will be on fire, setting off a horse race of depressing ideas and emotions. The worst thoughts I’ve ever had about myself all gallop to get a nose ahead of the others.

Assuming Power

April 24, 2021

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 53–57
Some feel that “smashing the patriarchy” is the ultimate goal of what they define as “feminism.” That is not my opinion. Each of us—female and male—have power given us to serve and lead, speak out and nurture, preach doctrine, and clean the bathrooms in the ward building.

The Theological Trajectory of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”

April 24, 2021

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 17–28
Huston argues that we should interpret that text in its historical context and glean from it new possibilities. Drawing on feminist interpretive strategies, Huston reads for the “theological trajectory,” rather than the plain meaning, to discern principles that might endure beyond a narrowly heterosexual nuclear family.

Queer Mormon Histories and the Politics of a Usable Past

April 24, 2021

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 1–16
Essentially, the debate becomes whether it is appropriate to apply the adjectives “gay,” “homosexual,” “transgender,” or similar terms to persons who lived before these terms had any meaning. Yale historian John Boswell freely used the term “gay” for medieval and ancient subjects who expressed a preference for same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, while recognizing it was a label impossible for them to apply to themselves, “making the question anachronistic and to some extent unanswerable.”

The Tapestry of Mormonism, Woven Larger | Mette Harrison, The Women’s Book of Mormon: Volume One

March 23, 2021

At the end of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, having semi-retired from her fight for women’s suffrage, decided to create what would come to be known as The Woman’s Bible. This biblical production sought to academically redress gender as it was then seen in the primary text. By working with a group of scholars and translators to re-navigate the conceptions of gender in the narrative, Stanton sought to radically liberate women from their contemporary oppressions, which she saw as being caused at least in part by the machinations of religion. I begin this review by turning to Stanton’s work because I believe Mette Harrison’s The Women’s Book of Mormon: Volume One is delving into similar territory by telling the story of the Book of Mormon through lenses, points of view, and characters that are rarely, if ever, seen in the text: the woman, the transgender person, the homosexual, the bisexual, the genderqueer, the asexual, the widowed, the unmarried, the demisexual, the nonbinary being, and more.