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…
The notion of apostasy is central to the identity of the Mormon people.[1] One might even say it is the raison d’être of Mormonism. It is the thing that explains why there needed to be…
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…
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…
Dialogue 20.2 (Summer 1987): 31–43
Stout’s article is a reminder just how important psychology and psychologists were for mediating these early debates. It really was groundbreaking in LDS print media. He talks about how he believed and presented publicly theories on the cause and cure of homoseuxaity, following Freudian psychology in 1970. “16 years later, “he states, “I can state that what I presented was wrong and simplistic. The evolving change in my views came by examining new research, gaining more clinical experience, and looking for alternative explanations to clarify some of the mystery surrounding the development of human sexuality and specifically homosexuality.” Stout’s overview provides a guide to the updated psychological research from the 1970s and 80s that overturned earlier consensus on the pathologization of homosexuality and on whether it can be cured. He tackles the ethical and moral issues with forced celibacy, but leaves the question as a mystery of paradox of how to proceed on the topic, warning against “extremes” on all sides.
Dialogue 52.1 (2019): 169–178
Young shares her testimony of temple work even though she found some wording in the endowment ceremony sexist.
Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 133–150
But Betsy was born. She was dangerously premature—especially so for those days. Everyone said that at birth she could have fit on a dinner plate (an image that haunted my young imagination). She wasn’t expected to survive. But she did. Perfect, whole, healthy.
Podcast version of this piece. I try to strengthen my relationship with my Heavenly Mother, but I’m not always sure how. Some days I sing, “Heavenly Mother, are you really there? And do you hear…
I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 25, 1993, almost immediately after Lavina Fielding Anderson was forced out of it.[1] Her stake disciplinary council had convened on September…
When the curtain rises on the Judeo-Christian garden story, we encounter a series of in-between or liminal phenomena: 1) Adam and Eve, who represent neither fallen humanity nor exalted deities, who “have no status, property,…