Queer Mormon Histories and the Politics of a Usable Past
Alexandria GriffinRead more
Spring 2021
The Spring 2021 Issue startles the viewer with it's powerful cover by Marlena Marie Wilding that Darron T. Smith then unpacks with his Art Note: The Mask We Must Wear in a Racist Society: Reflections of Black Suffering in the LDS Church Through Art. The Issue then beings with Alexandria Griffin's Queer Mormon Histories and the Politics of a Usable Past and is followed by M. David Huston's The Theological Trajectory of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” And if this isn't enough, there's an incredible Roundtable on White Supremacy in Mormonism and so many fascinating reviews and beautiful poetry. You won't want to miss it!
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. I am the youngest of three sisters, reared as a Protestant in the Illinois suburbs of Chicago. My mother was a nurse who returned to working when I was…
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. My brain is slightly broken. The natural lows and highs of life are amplified by chemical imbalance into deep emotional troughs and crazed manic waves that can strike anytime…
In the 1970s and ’80s there was a common attitude in the Church that a Latter-day Saint could not be gay, and the Church handbook was written in such a way as to allow individuals…
In 2008, I turned forty-five, Wall Street collapsed, California voters banned gay marriage, and I lost my virginity. The financial system’s meltdown changed the air I breathed, in the same way fire distributes ash for…
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The DAILY ENQUIRER—April 24, 1897A Poor Widow Distracted by Life’s Burdens “One of those events occurred this morning which causes the heart to grow sad and go out in…
Taipei, ’97. I walk past side-streetvendors selling lychee nuts and blackrice cakes, to an acre of bare dirt,concrete pylons lifting a cloverleaf.A grizzled man by a beat-up Buickthrows gobbets of meat from the trunkto a…
Not yet March, already weedsbring me to my kneeswith trowel and bare fingers. Under the loblollythe hellebore are in bloom,a periwinkle or two. The weeds are in the white gravelof the walk. My son has…
The jar is silent because it is full of praise.The grasshoppers are loud because they, too,are full of praise, clicking as they fly. The grasshoppers jump, but the jar is too high.They try to climb,…
Your hands were on my head first. No formal ceremony. I was an infantand shouting clouds trundled and thundered,atmospheric pressure strangled my stubborn ears refusing airflow.The blue chair in the living room rocked,my cries received…
She says she was eating or opening a window or just walkingdully along, and always had been, but tonight there might befew angels. These things. Our dogwagging across the foreground, the porchthat still needs fixing…
Givens and Hauglid are direct: their goal is to provide a sustained, academic, and nuanced treatment of the Pearl of Great Price [PGP]. Their motive lies in the fact that this volume has received relatively…
In an era awash in a sea of reboots and re-examinations, one may be forgiven for initially wondering why yet another treatment of Mormon Nauvoo is strictly necessary. The city, after all, has received its…
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…
Mormonism and White Supremacy is almost exactly what you would expect from a book with such a title. A brilliant and well-researched thesis analyzing the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…
In Mormonism and White Supremacy Joanna Brooks sets out to tell the Latter-day Saint racial story refracted through the lenses of white supremacy and racial innocence. As she describes it, her book “seeks to use…
Joanna Brooks’ Mormonism and White Supremacy is certain to engage readers who have opinions about (white) Mormon theology, (white) Mormon culture, (white) Mormon people or white American, anti-black supremacy as a concept and sociohistorical practice.…
One hundred seventy-two years ago this coming Wednesday, July 24, the first company of Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley, which was to be their new home. Being mostly a desert, it didn’t look…
I reflect upon a work of art by Marlena Wilding, a Black female artist with ties to Utah and Mormonism.[1] Her artwork is a stark representation of the complex nature of living while Black in…