Rosalynde Welch

ROSALYNDE FRANDSEN WELCH {[email protected]} is an independent scholar and writer on all things ofMormon faith and culture. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature, and her approach to cultural criticism incorporates literature, philosophy, and critical theory. Her writing has appeared in Dialogue, BYU Studies, Element, and many on-line venues. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, John, and their four children.

A Not-So-Innocent Abroad | Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary

Articles/Essays – Volume 49, No. 1

Craig Harline’s mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary, is a hilarious, heart-of-gold account of the highs and lows of the author’s experiences in the Belgium Antwerp Mission in the early 1970s. The story proceeds chronologically through the events of Harline’s mission call and training period in the old LTM, his arrival in Belgium and subsequent travails with uninterested Belgians, and his eventual return home as a slightly-older and probably-a-bit-wiser young man.

At Children’s Hospital

Articles/Essays – Volume 28, No. 3

I leaned against the glass door, struggling to open it against the air current that held it closed. With both hands now I pushed until finally I forced it open and found myself in the…

Insight Inside | Kathryn Lynard Soper, ed., The Mother in Me: Real-World Reflections on Growing into Motherhood

Articles/Essays – Volume 42, No. 2

At a climactic moment of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, an adult Daniel meets the mother who abandoned him in his infancy. To this now-grown son, she utters an accusation and issues an ultimatum: “Shall…

Faith and Doubt in the First-Person Singular | Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel; Robert Rees, ed., Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons; and Thomas Riskas, Deconstructing Mormonism:An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 4

In 1979, Mary Bradford published in these pages an important personal essay on personal essays. Titled “I, Eye, Aye,” the piece first outlines a brief history of the genre within Mormon letters and then offers its…

Mormon Priesthood Against the Meritocracy

Articles/Essays – Volume 47, No. 4

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 85–90 Defenses of the male-only LDS priesthood generally pursue a combination of three approaches: ground the practice in ancient scripture, secure it in Restoration history and tradition, or justify it through its sociological effects on gender culture and family formation in the present day.