Winter 2021
The Winter 2021 issue includes a 10-year retrospective with Editor Taylor Petrey on his famous "Post-Hetrosexual Mormon Theology." Also get excited for Grant Adamson's "Joseph Smith, Thomas Paine, and Matthew 27:51" and Roger Terry's "Getting the Cosmology Right." Also not one, not two, but three fiction pieces and four thought-provoking poems. And see what fascinating books were reviewed!
Introduction Despite its alleged antiquity, jutting back centuries before the Common Era, and its predominant setting in the Americas, the Book of Mormon contains several Matthean and Lukan additions to Mark made in the Greco-Roman…
Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that his problematic relationship with the law began in 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges in Bainbridge, New York. According…
Sporadically over the past few years I have been writing a personal document titled “What I Believe.” The reason for this is twofold. First, as I have learned more, my beliefs have shifted. This is…
Though there is a well-established conversation on how reproductive technologies and policies influence cisgender, heterosexual women’s bodies within Mormonism, there is a less established conversation on how reproductive technologies and policies are affecting LGBTQ+ Saints.[1]…
Ten years ago, my article “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” was published in Dialogue.[1] I did not know what to expect when it made its way into the world, but it ended up being a…
I don’t know why they’ve asked someone else to play the organ. I’ve been playing the organ in this ward for forty-eight years. When I first learned to play, I had to pump the air…
Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state…
Her eyelids were closing. It must have been the stillness in the room that made her realize. The two young elders advanced their slides across the laptop screen and it felt late. She nodded slowly.…
The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by…
Podcast version of this piece. I’m sitting in the bishop’s office. My dress is slightly damp, but I can’t determine whether the moisture is a result of the snowstorm or sweat beading beneath the cotton.…
Podcast version of this piece. Morning at homelistening to silenceand a solo cello,caressing old books,fog outside,fire inside. Treesin crystal veils,fog-doused sun,Earth’s palette replacedby soot and chalk. No color.Only grays,darker or lighter.No real black.No clean white.…
Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…
Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…
Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…
When I first sidled up to Make Yourselves Gods, I did so in the spirit of the Mormon Creed: “Mind your own business and let everybody else do likewise” (Trademark: 1842). Yes, I was suspicious.…
Growing up in the LDS faith, my parents always dutifully had large quantities of wheat, rice, beans, and all other manner of food stored—food we never ate in our daily lives. While they rarely discussed…
The latest in the Living Faith series, Charles Inouye’s Zion Earth Zen Sky is an autobiographical memoir about growing up as a child to Japanese American immigrants who met in the internment camps during World…
Women’s and gender studies emerged out of the women’s and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, movements the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vigorously opposed. The so-called New Mormon History flourished around the same time, opening the field to new approaches
When I was a kid, I loved doing dot-to-dot pictures. Do you know the ones I’m talking about? You began with a sheet of paper scattered with dots and tiny numbers, like a starry but…
BUC: A Boy among the Saints spans a “year in the life of an unregenerate 10 year old”—the endearing young rascal Wilford Bushman. Wilf, like most in his rural Utah community of Anti-Nephi-Lehi, is “BUC”—“born…
