Family

Making the Shadow Conscious | Rachel Rueckert, East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage

Mel Henderson

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung I’ll start with both a declaration and a disclaimer: East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with…

Knot Theory

Aurora Golden-Appleton

A knot can be a beautiful thing. A knot can reveal truths about how the world works. Some people are so enraptured by knots, they dedicate their lives to studying them. I’m devoting no energy…

First Place: Times and Seasons

Margaret Olsen Hemming

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.…

Third Place: All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

Mauri Pollard Johnson

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal. —Doctrine & Covenants 29:31 The therapist I had…

Sister’s Visions

English Brooks

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.…

Fear, Faith, and Other F-Words

T Boyd

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.…

Thoughts on the Sacrament During a Pandemic

Lori Davis

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The sacrament feels like a medical procedure these days. It’s passed by men, not boys. I wondered about that requirement until I looked around the chapel at our scanty,…

The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.

Bode and Iris

Levi S. Peterson

Listen to the piece here. It may seem odd that an experienced fornicator like Bode Carpenter would get the girl pregnant in the first place—particularly because he carried a condom in the watch pocket of…

Sweater

Theric Jepson

Mere Tears and Torrents, Signs and Seals: The Sweet Semantic Everything of Troubled Love Matthew James Babcock. Four Tales of Troubled Love

Jonathon Penny

Review: A Private Revelation William Victor Smith. Textual Studies of the Doctrine and Covenants: The Plural Marriage Revelation

Gary James Bergera

Roundtable: When Did You Become Black?

Gail Turley Houston

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”

From the Pulpit: My Mother’s Eclipse

Steven L. Peck

Light Departure

Ryan Shoemaker

For Doug Thayer  There was a knock at the apartment door. My companion, Carr, slouched at his desk, tinkering with a delicate butterfly he’d just formed from a piece of thin copper wire he’d retrieved…

City of Saints

David G. Pace

When Dennis Cormier arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City, his first appointment was already waiting. The visitor was fleshy, jowls and hips, about Dennis’ age, and…

The Shyster

Levi S. Peterson

Arne met Leanne Holburn at church during his final year in an MBA program at the University of Washington. He found her very attractive. Of medium height, she had sculpted cheeks, an aquiline nose, and…

Come to Zion

Annette Haws

Six months after she’d divorced her most recent husband, Sue kicked back the silk sheets one chilly morning and decided to take back her maiden name. She packed her bags, grabbed a cab to Charles…

AMEN

Johnny Townsend

“Dear Heavenly Father,” I began, “please help me do well on this test.” I was on my way to the Garfield Community Center in the Central District to take a skills test for a City…

Personal Voices: Still Making Sense of Suffering: Ruminations on Thirty-Five Years with Multiple Sclerosis

Marilyn D. White

Personal Voices: I Am Not Your Trigger

John Gustav-Wrathall

Personal Voices: Spare the Rod

Russell Arben Fox

The Intimacy of Fatherhood

Patrick Hemming

The Home Teacher

Heidi Naylor

Bishop warned Brock Hartman ahead of time. “They’ll ask for a food order.”  He opened a desk drawer and took out a binder filled with requisitions for the storehouse.  “But they have a decent income…

What Happened Sunday Morning

Erika Munson

When Danny DiLorenzo got up to speak I was thinking about how I could loosen my tie. My mother makes me wear one, and after an hour my body fights back. I stand in front…

Personal Voices: Eyes to See

Kylie Nielson Turley

I. Seeing Not . . . because they seeing not . . . Matthew 13:13 My first pair of glasses had green plastic rims and Coke-bottle thick, anti-glare-coated lenses, which reflected green light. In every…

Personal Voices: The Unending Conversation

Frances Lee Menlove

The Missing Mrs.

Marianne Hales Harding

Look at Me — I Am Your Son

Christie Lund Coles

Look at me, man, look at me! Get your veined nose off the grindstone;remove your ground sun glasses;see the sun, feel it. It is there; I remember it from my childhood(Was it yesterday or forever ago?)prickling upon…

This-Worldly and Other-Worldly Sex: A Response

Lowell Bennion

Carl Broderick’s essay treats many aspects of sex in an objective, discreet, and interesting way which should be helpful to Latter-day Saints, both in personal and family living and also in their responsibilities in the…

Three Philosophies of Sex, Plus One

Carlfred B. Broderick

The question of human sexuality and how it shall be interpreted and incorporated into life is one that every comprehensive philosophy of life must cope with. My strong conviction of this grows partly out of…

The Death of a Son

Carole Hansen

There was not even a 48-hour warning between the first x-rays of Kelden’s knee and the surgery which amputated his leg. When his physician-father took him for x-rays Sunday afternoon instead of waiting until Monday,…

The Divorced Latter-day Saint

Gayle Norton

Two marriages, two divorces, and years of living alone had helped make my aunt an independent, matter-of-fact sort of person. But she seemed almost too casual that night in 1956 when she told me my…

Why Latter-day Saint Girls Marry Outside the Church

Deon Price

Question: Why do Latter-day Saint girls marry non-Mormons?  Answers: “L.D.S. boys are away on missions or at school, and those not away date non-L.D.S. girls.” “L.D.S. boys don’t date much, but L.D.S. girls want to…

Expectations and Fulfillment: Changing Roles in Marriage

Chase Peterson

Mormons have a deep spiritual belief in the validity of joy. While sorrow and frustration are accepted features of all lives, we believe that in partnership with God’s spirit and plan we can minimize sorrow…

Free Agency and Conformity in Family Life

Veon G. Smith

The scriptures[1] and the teachings of the Church leaders about free agency indicate that man should pursue life according to free choice and on the assumption that he can and should use his intelligence, capabilities,…

Church Influence Upon the Family

Stanton L. Hovey

President David O. McKay described the two major purposes of the Church during the General Priesthood Meeting of the October, 1966, General Conference. The first is that of taking the message of the restoration to…

Technological Change and Erosion of the Patriarchal Family

Garth L. Mangum

Technological change is adequately recognized as a pervading influence in American and, to a lesser degree, Western European life. Technological progress is measured by the ability of technology to increase the output of a unit…

The Mormon Family in the Modern World: Introduction

Lowell Bennion

Not only is the family the primary social institution in Mormonism, it is also much too large a theme for a special section in one issue of Dialogue. Hopefully, the Journal will be able to…

Grandpa’s Place

Edward A. Geary

My grandfather, for whom I was named, was born in 1878 in a four-room stone house built by his father in Round Valley, near Morgan, Utah. My great grandfather had a small farm there and a job on the Union Pacific Railroad, but in the spring of 1883…

A Latter-day Ode to Irrigation

Dean L. May

In 1907 J. J. McClellan, then organist for the Mormon Tabernacle, published a new choral suite under the extravagant title, “Ode to Irrigation.” The first of five choruses described in heavy Victorian prose a truly…

Poor Mother

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

We have a new baby in our family. Soon after Amy was born, our oldest son introduced himself to the woman who was building a house behind ours. “And how many children are there in…

Greg

Douglas Thayer

When Greg woke up he lay on his stomach. The shaft of sunlight coming through the window hit his gold tennis trophy, Kellie’s gold-framed picture and his clock on top of the dresser. Priesthood meeting…

Living with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Wife’s Perspective

Bethany Chaffin

“Frank, please sit up here,” I pleaded, patting the doctor’s examination table and urging my husband forward. I was trying to be patient. By nature I move fast, and holding myself back to accommodate his slowness…

The Nursing Home

Elaine R. Alder

My mother was eighty-four, a widow of six months, and badly crippled with arthritis in the fall of 1981. She was also virtually blind. For the past six months, her eight children had watched anxiously…

Mary Ann

Marti Dickey Esplin

It was one of those crisp November days in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when I heard the news. Snuggled under a quilt, I was reading to my two young sons when the telephone interrupted us. It was…

And Baby Makes Two: Choosing Single Motherhood

Jerilyn Wakefield

As a school teacher in Tooele—junior high science/English—I carpool the forty miles from Salt Lake City every day. I had always assumed, as teens turned into twenties, that someday I would be married and raise…

Promise to Grandma

Kerry William Bate

When Sarah Roundy Sylvester was fighting death in the fall of 1938 she must have felt her life was unsuccessful. The promises of a good education, the status of a significant and unusual Church assignment,…

“In Jeopardy Every Hour”

Susan B. Taber

When my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abigail, and I went to the hospital, I left the pie crusts and rolls I had mixed up that morning on the kitchen table along with the dress pattern I had bought for my new niece. It had been months since I had felt this energetic, and so that morning I had begun a few projects while I waited for our sixth child to be born. The telephone awakened me from my after-lunch nap; the pediatrician wanted to see me in his office to discuss Abby’s blood test results. 

Religion and Suicide: A Records-Linkage Study

Phillip R. Kunz

Since the early studies of the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, suicide has interested sociologists. But suicide, by its very nature, has resisted study, and the problem of studying it has not eased over the years.…

Four Characteristics of the Mormon Family: Contemporary Research on Chastity, Conjugality, Children, and Chauvinism

Tim B. Heaton

From its inception, Mormonism has been characterized by a blend of traditional American culture mixed with unique, sometimes even radical, elements. The nineteenth-century Mormon family combined aspects of Puritan family morality with a unique theology…

To Watch a Daughter Die

Kathie Rampton Rockwood

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Three Poems for My Mother

Philip White

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Grandpa’s Coffee

Dennis Smith

It is a morning flight. We have gained altitude and are somewhere over the Colorado Rockies. Below, through breaks in the clouds, a thin film of early snowfall covers the mountaintops like a veil. High…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: East Meets West

Wilma Odell

I have enthusiastically accepted the invitation to share my experiences as a “cultural Jew” married to a “cultural Mormon.” Kenneth and I have been married almost twenty-three years. I have lived in Salt Lake City since 1971 and before that for nine months when we were first married. 

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Through a Stained-Glass Window

Juliana Boerio-Goates

Let me start by saying that I did not pick the title for this panel —I am not yet convinced that I have survived the experience intact. How ever, after more than fifteen years of…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: “To Celebrate the Marriage Feast Which Has No End”

Wendy S. Lee

Friends often ask me what it is like to be an active Lutheran layperson married to an active Latter-day Saint. I think I can best describe my marriage experience by addressing my comments to my…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Introductory Remarks

Karen Marguerite Moloney

Members of other religions, or persons with no religious affiliation, take on special challenges when they marry Latter-day Saints. In addition to the same problems any inter-faith marriage might encounter—conflicts over church attendance, child-rearing, value…

Heart of the Fathers

Thomas F. Rogers

The Child is father to the Man  Wordsworth You wake before the alarm you’d set for 4:30. You dress, almost ritually, and decide to fast. Today of all days you must maintain the proper mood—and…

Confessions of a Utah Gambler

Russell Burrows

The old hometown, Ogden, Utah, has long been an overlooked sports town. That is, if you take the adjective overlooked in an underground or an underworld sense, and if you broaden “sporting men” to include…

Rhythms

Marni Asplund-Campbell

My father’s heart is strong and scarred, bound in spots by thread, a delicate patchwork of veiny fabrics. I imagine, when I talk to him on the telephone, his physical presence. I can hear his…

Why Am I Here?

Gay Taylor

I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”

For Meg — With Doubt and Faith

Karen Rosenbaum

In times of drought, it is hard to remember times of flood. After yet another California winter without sufficient water, we take quick showers, rarely flush the toilet, let our lawn grow long to hide…

Hallelujah!

Angela G. Wood

I took my violin and my music from the back of the car and listened to my heels tap on the asphalt as I walked across the parking lot. It was an icy December night,…

Fatherless Child

Angela B. Haight

As I stood in the receiving line at my daughter’s wedding last May, a neighbor drew me aside.  “Have you seen Janet recently?” she asked, referring to her eldest, unmarried daughter.  “No,” I said.  “Well,…

A Jew Among Mormons

Steve Siporin

In the fall of 1990, I was asked to speak to an undergraduate honors seminar at Utah State University about being a Jew among Mor mons. I warned the student assigned the task of recruiting…

Demographics of the Contemporary Mormon Family

Tim B. Heaton

Certain characteristics of Mormon families are consistent with the social and theological emphasis the LDS Church places on family life. For example, in 1987 I wrote about the four C’s of the Mormon family: Chastity…

Who We Are, Where We Come From

Linda Sillitoe

Telling the truth about history is most essentially, I think, knowing who we are and where we come from.  When Mormon historians began to shed additional light on the beginnings of Joseph Smith and the…

Blessing the Dog

Brian Evenson

He waited, but the dog didn’t come.  He went back into the house. His wife was strapping on her brassiere, skin spilling over where the strap was tight.  “Seen the dog?” he said.  “Haen’t my…

If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

Margaret Merrill Toscano

Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.

“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology

Eric G. Swedin

The issue of sexuality, its expression or non-expression, even questions about its very nature, torments American culture. Various philosophies and systems of morality abound which advocate chastity, promiscuity, sex solely for procreation, sex for recreation,…

Sparrow Hunter

Douglas Thayer

At fourteen, when I could legally hunt game birds, I became a serious hunter. I hunted ducks and pheasants, but also rabbits, crows, rock chucks, hawks, owls, eagles, coyotes, rodents, and rattlesnakes. I never killed…

On Meditation

Marion Bishop

I used to run. Fast and furiously, always anxious, always thinking I should be quicker, go farther. I had friends who had run marathons and competed in 10Ks. I envied them and wanted to be like them: longer legs, faster times, thinner limbs. I counted calories and measured miles. I ran, but never liked it, didn’t like the way I beat myself up while I was running—”faster! faster!”—nor the fact that I dreaded the next run before the current one was even done. 

Brother Melrose

Douglas Thayer

The old man walked out from under the line of high, heavy trees bordering the cemetery. He stopped. He looked up, blinking his eyes. He held his hands palms up to the fading April sunlight.…

Measures of Music

B. W. Jorgensen

It came then that Sara dreamed of the flood. It had been the news for weeks, cities all along the Front sandbagging streets, sidewalks, driveways, window wells, a mudslide that made a lake over a…

Elijah’s Calling: 1840-41 (from This Could Be the Dawning of That Day)

Darius Gray

The following chapter is excerpted from One More River to Cross, the title of the first novel of a trilogy to be called Standing on the Promises being published by Deseret Book beginning in August…

There is Always Someplace Else (From There is Always Someplace Else)

Reed McColm

In 1957, a year and a half before she married the man who would leave her, Kören Dixon was almost the Carnival Queen of Conjuring Creek. There were only three nominations for the job, and…

Down on Batlle’s Farm

Patrick Madden

There’s an exercise in contrasts a few blocks east of Belloni up among the Pacheco streets north of Danubio in the barrio of Piedras Blancas. Former President of the Republic Jose Batlle had a farm…

Gay and Lesbian Mormons: Interviews with James Kent, Former Executive Director of Affirmation, and with Aaron Cloward, Founder and Coordinator of Gay LDS Youth

Hugo N. Olaiz

Dialogue 33.3 (Fall 2000): 123–136
Hugo Oliaz intervews two important figures in LDS LGBTQ organzing, a former diretor of Affirmation and the founder of Gay LDS Youth, a group that briefly flourished in the early 2000s. A great resource for learning more about LDS LGBTQ organizing in this period. 

The Truth, the Partial Truth, Something Like the Truth, So Help Me God

Clay L. Chandler

In October of 1993 Dallin H. Oaks, an apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Steve Benson, editorial cartoonist for the Arizona Republic and eldest grandson of former LDS president Ezra Taft Benson, had an argument in a public place. Their dispute centered on the role played by Apostle Boyd K. Packer in the September excommunication of Paul James Toscano. According to both men, this had been a subject of discussion between them during two “confidential” meetings.

Philosophical Christian Apology Meets “Rational” Mormon Theology

L. Rex Sears

As Joseph Smith matured in his prophetic calling, he came to regard what he saw as the rational appeal of his developing theology as one of its chief virtues. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, this attitude continued to animate authoritative interpretations and defenses of Mormon doctrine offered by leading Mormon churchmen and intellectuals.

On “Defense of Marriage” A Reply to Quinn

Armand L. Mauss

D. Michael Quinn, a scholar for whom I have immense respect, has written what he calls a “prelude” to the national campaign in “defense of marriage” with reference particularly to the efforts of the LDS…

Prelude to the National “”Defense of Marriage”” Campaign: Civil Discrimination Against Feared or Despised Minorities

D. Michael Quinn

America is currently in the midst of state-by-state political activism and judicial appeals to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage. In 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated one example of the related effort to roll back laws protecting homosexuals from civil discrimination, but this campaign moves forward on various fronts in every state of the Union. Its organizers will certainly extend this political activism into all states currently lacking a “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA) which both prohibits same-sex marriage and refuses to recognize such unions legally performed in other states or countries. In view of the pace for this state by-state political activism during the 1990s, the Defense of Marriage campaign will probably continue throughout the United States for at least another decade.

David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the Foundation for the 1978 Revelation

Gregory A. Prince

“If there was every a person, in terms of social justice in our society, for fairness, it would have been David O. McKay. Had it been up to him, alone, he would have given the Black the priesthood that quick!” So spoke one general authority recently, who was called to his position by President McKay and who discussed with him the issue of ordination of Blacks. 

A Voice from the Land of Zion: Elder Erastus Snow in Denmark 1850 to 1852

Val G. Hemming

A few years ago while visiting a used bookstore in the Old City (Gamla Stan) section of Stockholm, I asked the proprietor whether he had any materials about Mormons. He brought out a small and likely unique (3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″) 39-page pamphlet titled, “Om Mormonerne” (About the Mormons), by S. B. Hersleb Walnum, a “Prison Priest,” published in Bergen, Norway, in 1852.

The Danish Genesis of Virginia Sorensen’s Lotte’s Locket

Susan Elizabeth Howe

[1]Describing her research for The Proper Gods, a novel about the Yaqui Indians and their culture, Virginia Sorensen said her work had been “an excursion into cultural anthropology” that she thought would continue the rest…

Eggertsen Men: Male Family Influences in Virginia Sorensen’s Kingdom Come and the Evening and the Morning

Sue Saffle

Much has been written about the heroines in Virginia Sorensen’s adult fiction, their real-life counterparts, and inspirations. By contrast, relatively little attention has been given to her male characters and the family figures on whom many were based. As a self-proclaimed family chronicler, Sorensen found in her male forbears, indeed all members of the Eggertsen family, a significant source of information and ideas for her fiction. 

History, Memory and Imagination in Virginia Eggertsen Sorensen’s Kingdom Come

William Mulder

Many years ago Virginia Sorensen wrote me a prophetic letter. She had just read my article, “Through Immigrant Eyes: Utah History at the Grass Roots.” She sounded breathless: “For years and years/’ she wrote, “I have believed—for what reason, I wonder, since I never really lived in the houses where the true tradition was but could only visit a while, and listen, and pause always by the gate where I could hear and see it?—that I was the one to tell this story you speak of. Almost I have heard The Call!”

Keepsakes

Steven Cantwell

On the day of her funeral, my mother’s two sister-wives put on a dinner in her honor. Sister Karen and Sister Sharlene spent the morning before the services baking pies and fresh bread, making potato…

Grandpa and the Petrified Oysters

Charles Thompson

Whenever I visited my grandparents, I always knew where to check for Granddad. As a means of escaping household routine, he maintained a remote kingdom, a long shed deep in the interior of the backyard…

Our Big Fat Temple Weddings: Who’s In. Who’s Out. And How We Get Together

David G. Pace

The popular film My Big Fat Greek Wedding suggests that ethnic families will flood pell mell into any space provided by a family member who announces she or he is getting married. In the case…

Belonging

Lisa Torcasso Downing

I am part of the usual Gospel Doctrine “crowd,” and although I’m not one of those folks who can sleep upright in a metal chair, I have refrained from being an active participant in the…

Mind, Body, and the Boundary Waters

Susan Sessions Rugh

As I eased myself behind the wheel of my car in early spring 1994,1 was exhausted. I had been on campus all day teaching and consulting with students and had just finished teaching a three-hour…

Grandpa’s Visit

Patti Hanks

My husband’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Hanks, live in Utah and come to visit our family in Michigan every summer. We all look forward to their visits, especially our children. Grandpa is pleasant and takes…

Cemetery Life

Kylie Nielson Turley

My yellow 1946 house faces Provo’s peculiarly Mormon-Utah-style cemetary. Tall trees line small lanes which are set at precise right angles, a perfect grid made by Latter-day pioneer planners. The lanes come complete with miniature…

Scenes from the Movie

Kim Simpson

I spent my 1970s boyhood in one of those remote subdivisions that had begun sprouting up along the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains in the westernmost part of the Salt Lake Valley. From just about…

Plinka! Plinka! Plinka!

Bessie Loyd Soderborg Clark

We had to get to Glendora, California, to comfort our daughter, whose husband had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, the previous Sunday morning. When we finished loading the car and turned the key, nothing happened. The…

What You Don’t Know

Melody Warnick

A man of many stories, my father left behind only a handful in the end. Primarily this is my fault; my mind long ago funneled such information into a vast reservoir of forgotten knowledge, where…

The Homecoming

Aaron Orullian

Elder Jeff Lee Johnson came home on January 24 at 2:14 in the afternoon. The plane had made its way north all that day, stopping in Miami, then Atlanta before finally arriving six minutes ahead…

Toward a “Marriage Group” of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories

B. W. Jorgensen

In a now canonical article in 1912, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” George Lyman Kittredge applied the term “marriage group” to a subset among Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath (and her polemic and confessional prologue), the Clerk, the Merchant, and the Franklin. Later scholars sometimes enlarged the group or questioned the inclusion of various tales, but it has persisted as an object of critical attention. Obviously, in proposing a “marriage group” of contemporary Mormon short stories, I cannot expect to discover the kind of “conversation” or “debate” that Chaucerians from Kittredge to Kaske and beyond have analyzed.

Thanksgiving

Angela Hallstrom

Beth: Listening  “Take care,” says my Grandma Tess. She is the first one to leave after Thanksgiving dinner because she can’t drive at night. She’s got two hours’ driving to do, south to Salt Lake.…

Brown

Charmayne Gubler Warnock

I’m mostly brown. I have brown hair and, in summer, brown skin. It’s not a pretty golden brown like the models in the tanning lotion ads. It’s a kind of ashy, dirty brown. My eyes…

Miracle

Eric Samuelsen

Lucille Wentworth sat in her working on her cross-stitch, watching Judy and Ray hold hands, sitting across from her on the couch. It was late, past one; they’d talked for hours, the conversation flowing around…

’Atta Boy

Kristen Carson

Latham Runyon wondered what time he ought to close his window. It was going to be a tongue-hanger today. But for now, the morning was still dewy and bearable.  He pulled his half-glasses up to…

Homecomings

Larry Day

At Eastside School in Idaho Falls, they gave us a full hour for lunch; and like most of the kids, I went home each day. Mom always had my lunch ready. I’d gulp it down…

White Shell

Arianne Baadsgaard Cope

There are pieces of white shell sifted with the sands and soils of Dinetah that confuse newcomers and outsiders. Tourists look at the shells like puzzle pieces, trying to force them into what they know.…

Heloise and Abelard

Coby Fletcher

“We’ll get there by ten.” Nod and look behind, dance a quickstep ahead of the noise of a thousand feet on the wet pavement of Liege. Feels strange to be thrown into a world you’re…

En Route: A Journey of the Spirit

L. Jackson Newell

In the introduction to his epic short story, “A River Runs Through It,” Norman Maclean wrote that his primary aim was to let his “children know what kind of people their parents are or think they are or hope they are.” This sentiment captured my initial purpose in crafting this essay. Dealing chiefly with my evolving spiritual life, it is the story of a youth whose extended family took religion seriously, even seriously enough to live peaceably with its great diversity of belief; it is the tale of a free spirit butting heads with a tightly disciplined institution; and it is the record of a family spiritual legacy, one noticeably different in beliefs and loyalties than the typical Latter-day Saint has come to know and cherish through his or her heritage.

Sister Love

Susan Morgan

“You’re acting like a child,” said Karen.  “I’m not,” said Lynn, and looked with determination at her dinner plate. She could feel Karen’s anger vibrating against her skin. “Oh, don’t talk to me—”  Lynn glanced…

Follow Me, Boys

Kristen Carson

The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…

Frau Rüster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance

Roger Terry

When Elder Callister and I leaned our bikes against the fence at Hermann-Löns-Straße 9 and walked to the door, I had no idea that what was about to transpire would shape and anchor my soul…

Depression and the Brethren of the Priesthood

Mack Patten

During the last few years, I have come to feel that, if I were in charge of Church jargon, we would get rid of the words blessings, rewards, punishments, and tests. In place of those words, we would begin using “lessons to be learned.” I have also come to believe that some venue, or arena, or, at least, some safe place should be available where members could voice their concerns—without guilt—about their distresses, their disappointments, and their frustrations at what is going on in their lives. 

Seeds of Faith in City Soil: Growing Up Mormon in New York City

Neylan McBaine

In June 2004, I found myself, late on a Saturday night, climbing underneath the dressing room doors of the Manhattan New York Temple. Audio/visual equipment for the next morning’s temple dedication blocked most of the dressing room doors, but my goal was to reach every locker in both the men’s and women’s dressing rooms. Each key needed to be labeled with the corresponding locker’s number, and then a spare key had to be placed in the temple’s facilities closet. 

The Blessing

Larry Day

You never can tell what April is going to be like in Boise. Sometimes you get sunshine, sometimes you get rain, and sometimes you get blizzards that roar out of the canyons. I died in…

Entertaining Angels Unaware

Laura McCune-Poplin

Lucy hated arguing with her companion in public, even though they argued in English so most people couldn’t understand what they were saying, and those who did could probably care less. They didn’t argue often,…

The Beings I Love Are Creatures

Kate Holbrook

A Visit for Tregan

Jack Harrell

Tregan Weaver was driving home from Madison High in his little black CRX on the first warm day of spring in Rexburg, Idaho. The trees along Main Street were in blossom, the lawns were turning…

Gentle Persuasions

William Morris

I I often went with my father on home teaching visits when I was ten and eleven. I don’t remember why his companions were never around. I suppose they were inactive. Back then, inactivity wasn’t…

Buildings

Tona J. Hangen

May Many Phoenixes Rise

Allison Pingree

A Deep Reverence in My Heart; Part of Our Family

Clayton Christensen

Looked like a Church, Sounded like a Church; How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

Molly Bennion

Move Back in a Heartbeat

Marilyn Lee Brown

The Bonds Endure; Freudian Analysis of Lehi’s Dream

Jim Johnston

Tribute to a Building; Giving Church a Try

Arthur Shek

Not Different from My Home

Katsu Funai

Equally Warm, Whether Empty or Full

Aja Fegert Eyre

Not the Building

Erin L. Crowley

An Anchor for Me

Paula Kelly Caryotakis

Matzoh for Sacrament

Steve Rowley

Ten Fictions about My Father

Nathan Robison

1  First he went down to Pappy’s pasture. The pasture was a strip of marshy land down the hill from our house, sandwiched by the inter state and train tracks where Pappy kept his cows.…

Hurt or Make Afraid

Samuel M. Brown

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, In His house full of light, Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; There the saints will shine bright.  William Clayton, 1846  I’m cold. We’ve been walking…

Fish Stories

Annette Haws

Although it had never been formally declared or written in cursive on a piece of parchment, Jolene understood her place in the family hierarchy. She was right there between the ancient golden retriever and the…

That the Glory of God Might Be Manifest

W. Paul Reeve

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology

Taylor G. Petrey

Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology”  was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times.⁠ To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article. 

Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Terence L. Day

Katy, My Sister

Jenn Ashworth

We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…