Few topics have dominated modern Mormon discourse as much as those related to homosexuality. Especially following the contentious and engrossing debates surrounding Proposition 8—the electoral battle in California in 2008 over the legality of same-sex…
I first discovered James Goldberg when a friend from my mission shared a blog post from the Mormon Midrashim entitled “Explanation, Justification, Sanctification.” In it, the author shares some profound theology with his ten-year-old daughter in a…
“To speak to Moses, God / put a stone in his mouth, put on / a sackcloth of verbs (want, need), / cleared his throat. Cried out” (3). Sunni Brown Wilkinson this way begins her collection The…
Judging by its length, Irreversible Things is the kind of book that I should have been able to finish in a couple hours. Perhaps one evening, after the kids had gone to bed, I could curl up…
Latter-day Screens is a fascinating, compelling, and, at times, frustrating look at a wide range of Mormon-related media. This is largely due to the central conceit of the book—essentially working with Mormonism as a meme and…
In March of 1895, in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened ten short, single-shot films for an audience of two hundred, and the movies were born. Less than ten months later, after years of petitioning,…
Mark 5:9—“My name is Legion: for we are many”—opens Karin Anderson’s masterwork Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Anderson lyrically pools her ancestral narrative in sweeping loops, eddying history, religion, and landscape. Ghosts speak elusive,…
As a kid growing up near the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, I spent most of my time plotting my escape—from childhood itself, but more specifically from a Mormon childhood in Utah. I…
There are many different ways to construct a fantasy universe. Some are flowers, carefully grown from a single seed. Some are mirrors, with each element corresponding to a specific parallel in our own world for…
On December 6, 2019, the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah hosted a release party for The Cunning Man. The novel, which has scenes in the city and in the old coal mines nearby…