Summer 2016
The Summer 2016 issue begins with Michael Parker, Daniel Parkinson, and Benjamin Knoll exploring suicide within the Mormon LGBTQ community, followed by Benjamin Knoll giving additional context regarding youth suicides within the Mormon community. These are followed by several personal stories regarding the gay and queer perspectives in the LDS church. Also contained in this issue is artwork by Kimberly Anderson titled The Mama Dragon Story Project as well as several beautiful works poetry, two pieces of fiction by Theric Jepson and Levi Peterson. The issue is rounded out by several book reviews, a sermon, and a roundtable on the history of the Exponent II.
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 1–24
The November 2015 LDS handbook policy change that identified mem- bers who participate in same-sex marriages as “apostates” and forbade children in their households from receiving baby blessings or baptisms sparked ongoing attention to the topic of LGBTQ Mormon well-being, mental health, and suicides.
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 25–44
Much has been discussed and written regarding whether or not the rate of LGBT youth suicides in the Mormon community has risen in the wake of the November 2015 handbook policy change that categorizes same-sex married couples as “apostates” and forbids baptism to children in same-sex married households.
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 45–50
“I am the mother of a queer son. I am also an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as a professor at Brigham Young University, where I teach courses in literacy education, educational research methods, and multicultural education.”
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 51–60
“Of course, I didn’t really want to be a wife. But I was eight years old, and in my mind, if all I really wanted from the future was a husband, then that must mean that I wanted to be a wife.”
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 61–80
The photographs and essays featured in this issue of Dialogue come from Kimberly Anderson’s Mama Dragon Story Project: A Collection of Portraits and Essays from Mothers Who Love Their LGBT+ Children
Possibility one, extrapolated from what Betty, second clarinet, said about what Tabitha, first clarinet, did last Saturday: They enter the hotel room, both of them shaking as only virgins can shake. Somehow he manages to…
His name was Reeves Kirby and he was eighteen that summer. He was small of stature and unlikely to grow bigger. Moreover, he had a mild temperament, blond hair, bland blue eyes, and a downy…
Morning light pierces the green canopy. There is weightiness to this place.
This place has known God. Its very existence glorifies him, yearns for him.
As we enter, me and my girl,
the delicate proboscis of her finger
unfurls, hopeful, even expectant.
She is a perfect, peach-soft landing.
Did you know everything all happened in one split
microsecond after a cosmic pea exploded in a
perfect vacuum? I will avoid the observation that
all things we can observe therefore come from split
Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt by Patrick Mason is part of the Living Faith series by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Announcing the series, the Maxwell Institute wrote: “Each [book] will contain the voice of a scholar who has cultivated a believing heart while engaging in the disciplines of the Academy.”
While reading Planted one evening, I turned to my wife, Sara, and said, “I think that we are in the book.” I was reading an anecdote that Patrick shares near the end about some non-LDS Christian friends who attend a ward Christmas party. As they observe people talking and children running around, the friends comment on how much they admire the community because it feels like a real family (170). I remember making those comments.
Short story collections are a medium well suited to explorations of Mormonism as a culture and what it means to be Mormon. They allow for diversity. They impose few limitations. They permit an author to…
How to represent lived religious experience without either underplaying its reality or slipping into the magical-fantastical is an ongoing difficulty in Mormon literature. David G. Pace, in his novel Dream House on Golan Drive, has decided…
Three decades after the LDS Church lifted the priesthood ban on African Americans, scholars are offering readers a host of new studies that address the legacy of racial thought and practice in the LDS Church.…
Last year was the fortieth anniversary of Exponent II, a “modest, but sincere,” as we called it, little newspaper begun in Massachusetts written by and for LDS women. That brings it within two years of the lifetime that the old Woman’s Exponent was published from 1872 to 1914. All indicators suggest that Exponent II will last longer than the earlier paper.
In her editorial in the very first issue, Claudia Bushman wrote “Exponent II, posed on the dual platforms of Mormonism and Feminism, has two aims: to strengthen The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to encourage and develop the talents of Mormon women.” Years later, in an attempt to be welcoming to women wherever they were on the spectrum of belief and activity in Mormonism, we, as a board, vehemently discussed and re-wrote our mission statement, changing the phrase “Our common bond is our commitment to the Church and the women of the Church” to “Our common bond is our connection to the Church and our commit ment to women.” So, even though we questioned and diluted somewhat that first platform, we have always firmly adhered to the second, that of feminism. But Claudia was unknowingly throwing down a gauntlet by declaring our “modest little paper,” as she called it, to be feminist.
As a sixth-generation Latter-day Saint, I’ve grown up with Church history—it was a frequent topic of conversation whenever our extended family gathered. My second-great-grandfather, George Whitaker, wrote of working as a teamster for Parley P. Pratt when Nauvoo was abandoned in February 1846. Essentially, he’d crossed the ice with a load of Brother Pratt’s wives. The story of George Whitaker is well known. Carol Madsen used his story as an introductory chapter in her book Journey to Zion: Voices from the Mormon Trail.Other family histories whetted my appetite for more information about Church history.
I grew up in the Cambridge Ward. Wonderful student wives were my Mutual teachers. Unmarried graduate students sat around our family dinner table every Sunday. I was raised in Cambridge Mormondom. Latter-day Saint culture, scripture,…
Hi, my name is Eunice McMurray. I’m married to Peter, who is an ethnomusicologist, and I’m a mom to four-year-old Penny, who is currently my job. We’ve been in the ward about ten years. I was originally asked to speak last week, but I was in Korea visiting my grandfather who is sick. He and my grandmother raised me on a chicken farm until I was five and I moved to the US with my parents. I joined the Church when I was twelve and, not having had the public speaking training from going to Primary, I am perpetually terrified of giving sacrament meeting talks. I even asked Penny to give this talk for me, but she said no because this pulpit is too big for her.
