DiaBLOGue

Negotiating Black Self-Hate within the LDS Church

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 29–44
Smith considers “why would any self-aware Black person find Mormonism the least bit appealing given its ignoble history of racial exclusion and marginalization?”

Looking Back, Looking Forward: “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine” 45 Years Later

It has been forty-five years since Dialogue published my essay entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview”and forty years since Official Declaration 2 ended the priesthood/temple ban. It seems like a good time to take stock of where we are: what has changed, what has stayed the same, what changes still need to happen, and what steps need to occur to bring about those changes. 

My Mother’s Eclipse

My Mother died on July 13, 2017. 

One late afternoon about a month later, on August 20, 2017 to be exact, my friend Steve and his wife Jill picked me up along with my adult son Jaron to chase the total eclipse tacking across the United States the next day.

The Loss of Art, The Art of Loss

Sylvia Plath wrote “Dying / Is an art, like everything else.” Perhaps there is an art to grieving as well. People talk about “closure” and “saying goodbye” like discrete events: things you do once—well or poorly—and then move on. But where exactly do we move on to? As Mark Strand points out, “In a field / I am the absence / Of field. / This is / always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing.” Since my father’s death, my missing place keeps converging with his ever-shifting empty place in surprising ways. I miss Paul, miss him the same way I might miss an imagined top stair on an unfamiliar staircase in the dark: the same betrayal of expectation, the same queasy-falling feeling in the stomach, the same jolt against reality. 

The Empty Space between the Walls | Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record

The intellectual strength of Mormon scholarship lies in the academic study of its own history. As important as the study of that history is, less than one percent of the world’s population has any interest in it. If Mormonism wishes to become more than a local sect, if it wishes to become a global religion, it must stop being so self-absorbed and start speaking a moral language comprehensible to a larger portion of the world.

Envisioning Mormon Art | Laura Allred Hurtado, Immediate Present

Last summer, the Church History Museum was busy preparing to send art from Salt Lake City to New York City. The backstory of this move was the foundation of the Mormon Arts Center. This nonprofit is the brainchild of historian Richard Bushman and author Glen Nelson, trying to fill a gap in what they saw in Mormon arts and arts scholarship.