Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, Author at Dialogue Journal

Mormon Extremism and Zombies in Idaho | Leah Sottile, When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder Wild Faith, and End Times

On May 16, 2005, Joseph Edward Duncan murdered Brenda Groene, her thirteen-year-old son, and her boyfriend. Police officers in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, found their bodies “face down in a welter of blood” (1). They didn’t…

She Simply Wanted More: Mormon Women and Excommunication

Articles/Essays – Volume 56, No. 3

Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 109–123
As an adult, I learned that 1993 represented a kind of death for members of the Mormon studies community. Since the 1970s, Latter-day Saint women had been challenging the limited role the Church provided for female spirituality.

God and Politics Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

Articles/Essays – Volume 54, No. 1

In the mid-twentieth century, Ezra Taft Benson was an important political figure who despised communism and feared that the United States was on the road to moral decay. He decried the rise of feminism and…

The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah

Articles/Essays – Volume 53, No. 1

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.

Mormon History Association Conference: To Forsake Thy Father and Mother: Mary Fielding Smith and the Familial Politics of Conversion

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 3