Charlotte Scholl Shurtz

CHARLOTTE SCHOLL SHURTZ {[email protected]} is a queer Mormon woman, author, and poet. She graduated from Brigham Young University in 2019 with a degree in English and a minor in professional writing and rhetoric. She is a cofounder of the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project, a digital repository of creative works celebrating the feminine divine.

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Articles/Essays – Volume 55, No. 1

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

A Queer Heavenly Family: Expanding Godhood Beyond a Heterosexual, Cisgender Couple

Articles/Essays – Volume 55, No. 1

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 69–98
Although the concept of Heavenly Mother is empowering for many women, the focus on God as a cisgender, heterosexual couple also limits who can see their own divinity reflected in the stories told about God. First, with Heavenly Mother as the only female divinity, divine expression of womanhood is restricted to motherhood. This excludes many women, including women struggling with infertility, women who do not wish to become mothers, and transgender women who experience motherhood differently than fertile, cisgender women.