“That’s just cheap social issue novel bullshit. . . . [It] makes people like us hope for a smaller, neater world where stories make sense and converge” (228). This is protagonist Cassandra Soelberg’s response when confronted by…
In the summer of 2009, as a master’s student, I sat in one of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute’s summer seminars when the topic turned to the absence of a biography on Joseph F. Smith.…
If the strength of a religious community is determined by how vigorously its leaders, scholars, and members can renegotiate the historical and common interpretations of its sacred texts while maintaining community cohesion, then the (re)scripturalization…
From Matriarchs I come from a multigenerational line of women who crave Mother Earth. My great-grandma worked in Yellowstone National Park every summer and married a Yellowstone architect. My grammie basically grew up there, as…
Stonehenge was a disappointment. If we had shown up for the summer solstice, we could have touched the stones while watching the sun rise. However, that would have involved fighting our way through a crowd…
“Pretty girls don’t buy cocaine,” Greta[1] says and laughs as she walks out the front door. My hands and face sting as I stand frozen in the entryway and hear her start the car. I’d…
Listen to an interview about this piece here. Laurie zips up her red jacket and curses God and Dennis. Except God probably doesn’t exist. Dennis exists. He is right in this moment existing in their…
In my estimation, Sara M. Patterson’s The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism will be regarded as one of the most important works of Latter-day Saint/Mormon scholarship of the twenty-first century.…
Listen to an interview about this piece here. On February 27, 1961, two hundred British Singing Mothers, dressed in matching Utah-sewn white blouses and fashioning neat, short, curled hair, stood in tiers on the stage…
A family is a thing with edges. The edges can grow, shrink, smooth off, and get spikey and sharp. The changes that happen can be full of joy, sadness, loss, trauma, comfort, or strength. None…