I was a high school senior in September 1993, when Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides were disfellowshipped or excommunicated from the Church of Jesus…
“Scott Eccles?” “Yes!” “Please follow me.” Scott Eccles leapt from his seat, straightened his tie, and surreptitiously placed his fists on his hips in the Superman pose, for he had watched a video online that…
Even in the modesty of its title, Picnic in the Ruins is a deceptively ambitious novel. At once wry and gentle, its depiction of the various lives and stories that become snarled up in a…
Renaissance scholar Ada Palmer estimates we know 1 percent of what happened five hundred years ago and that two-thirds of what we know is wrong. I have no reason to doubt her expertise—and every reason…
Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. They came to us just before spring arrived, at the same time I began putting seeds into the ground in my garden. Lettuce, spinach, arugula.…
Dialogue 55.4 (Winter 2022): 41–83
Drawing on observations and suggestions from scholars of Tibetan Buddhism and Mormonism, this article compares the production of the Book of Mormon with that of the class of Tibetan Buddhist scripture known as gter ma (“Treasure,” pronounced “terma”)
Dialogue 55.4 (Winter 2021): 1–50
While much has changed for women in the Church over the last half-century, much remains the same. Women consistently make up less than 3 percent of quotations in general conference. They are still described in terms of their appearance and relationship status; sermons about how they should live are the domain of male authority; their own representatives in the Church spend much of their time at the pulpit repeating male leaders’ words.
Listen to this piece here. I come from a family of Mormons, although perhaps somewhat unorthodox ones. Somewhere in England and what is today Romania, my father’s ancestors heard of a man named Joseph Smith…
One thing a reader learns from Terryl Givens’s new biography is that no one who knew Eugene England could claim to be an objective appraiser of his life. Countless individuals revered him; he had guided…
The eight essays in this collection describe and interpret the US Senate’s investigation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the Progressive Era. Nominally an investigative hearing on the election of Utah…