Back to all topics

Theology

Recommended

A Question of Authority

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…

So Then They Are No More Twain, But One: An Exploration of Liminality

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,…

The Quest for Mutual Empathy in the Gospel

Relational–cultural theory suggests that the primary source of suffering for most people is the experience of isolation and that healing occurs in growth-fostering connection. Judith V. Jordan “For as the body is one, and hath…

O Magnum Mysterium

I’ve heard many women say that the day their child was born was the best day of their life, but it was the worst day of mine. After laboring for nearly forty hours, my body…

Model Cars Are Not Cars (And Theories of Atonement Are Not Atonement)

If you mistake a model car for a real car, you’re going to have problems. I spent much of my life making that mistake in my thinking about atonement. I had read that “God’s justice…

Rethinking Revelation

When I was about twelve, yet another retelling of the Cinderella story was released into theatres in a magic-free but nonetheless magical version called Ever After. One of my favorite scenes in this film involves…

Second Place: Pressed Palms

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. —Romans 12:2 One spring weekend, with a six-­month-­old…

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. Michael Reed’s 2012 book Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo sets out an excellent account of the uncomfortable relationship between the Church…

On the Value of Doubt

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

All Content

A Question of Authority

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…

So Then They Are No More Twain, But One: An Exploration of Liminality

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,…

The Quest for Mutual Empathy in the Gospel

Relational–cultural theory suggests that the primary source of suffering for most people is the experience of isolation and that healing occurs in growth-fostering connection. Judith V. Jordan “For as the body is one, and hath…

O Magnum Mysterium

I’ve heard many women say that the day their child was born was the best day of their life, but it was the worst day of mine. After laboring for nearly forty hours, my body…

Model Cars Are Not Cars (And Theories of Atonement Are Not Atonement)

If you mistake a model car for a real car, you’re going to have problems. I spent much of my life making that mistake in my thinking about atonement. I had read that “God’s justice…

Rethinking Revelation

When I was about twelve, yet another retelling of the Cinderella story was released into theatres in a magic-free but nonetheless magical version called Ever After. One of my favorite scenes in this film involves…

Second Place: Pressed Palms

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. —Romans 12:2 One spring weekend, with a six-­month-­old…

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. Michael Reed’s 2012 book Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo sets out an excellent account of the uncomfortable relationship between the Church…

On the Value of Doubt

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

Dear Heavenly Mother

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 167
I am encouraged by small changes, but change takes time. For now, I will speak your name. I will make you part of our eternal narrative. I will share your love and stop myself from looking past you. I will teach my children to see your light and be lifted by your strength, that they will speak your name as easily as they do Father’s—for both of you are part of their eternal makings.

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

Got Wheat? Christopher James Blythe, Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse

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…

Ceci n’est pas une Mormon Studies Book Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

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.…

The Casting Out of Spirits

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…

Getting the Cosmology Right

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…

The Words and Worlds of Smith and Brown Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism

In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed what was intended to be the crowning accomplishment of physics—an experiment to determine how movement through the luminiferous ether changed the speed of light. What they found…

Spirit of Pentecost

Instead of unremitting lucha libre, I desired détente between my sexuality and birth faith. A gap between graduation from law school and starting work opened a unique space for spiritual odyssey. I resumed attending church…

Thoughts on the Sacrament During a Pandemic

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,…

Review: “Babbling on toward Ephemeral Patterns” Patrick Madden, Disparates

Alphabetize yourkarma, sever your qigong,jinx your wifi code. Disparates, 134 I want to suggest that Disparates is less disparate than it claims to be, that there is a running theme or a coherent message that…

Rubik’s Palimpsest: Searching for My Indigeneity

From my youth I was blessed with a God-shaped hole in my identity. I knew I came from somewhere, that my ancestors were whole and bore a cultural armor that it was my right to…

Confession

I’m not making excuses, Bishop, I’m really not. What I did, it’s inexcusable. Reprehensible. I broke sacred vows. I totally crossed the line, and I’m sorry for that. All that stuff. But the thing I honest-to-gosh don’t get is why my husband’s so hot and bothered about it unless it maybe bruised his big fat little ego. Yes, I told him. A week ago. At first he went all Incredible Hulk on me—eyes bulging, face bloating. From there it was the Grim Weeper: “How could you have done this to me? To us!” Meanwhile I’m wondering who’s this wonderful fairy tale us he’s talking about?

Archive of the Covenant: Reflections on Mormon Interactions with State and Body

Dialogue 53.4 (Winter 2020): 79–107
In the logic of Mormon theology, an internal lack of faith is in part a result of the mismanagement of my mortal embodiment. Part of the reason that the “born this way” language of the marriage equality movement has had so little effect on the Mormon population compared to others is that it directly contradicts very recent and revered theological claims.

Pray Without Ceasing

The scriptures often admonish us to pray continuously. Note that I said “continuously,” not “continually.” “Continually” means repeated with interruptions, but “continuously” means without interruptions. Paul tells the saints in Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing”…

Elegy for the Eaten

To the Ones who
Awakened the Universe with a word
And set the Cosmos afire.

A Blessing for Starting Over

First, bless the burst of anger; its force will get you free.

Then, bless the tears that follow; they will provide new sight.

Bless your bare feet as you put them on the earth. Run.

Three Dogs in the Afterlife

that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there ª waits while ● gets her bearings. It always takes a little while, he says. ● lifts her spirit nose, trying and…

Performative Theology: Not Such a New Thing

A movement called “scriptural theology” has been part of academic theology for some time now, since the 1980s or earlier.[1] In spite of that, with some exceptions I will note, it has had little impact…

What the Second Coming Means to People Like Me

A few of you will remember Carl Poll, who served maybe three decades ago as bishop of the Palo Alto Ward. In 1967 his brother, historian Richard Poll, visited Palo Alto and gave a sacrament…

Certain Places

He folds his sash, his apron, his robe. Stacks them on the cold laminate counter. Places the cap on top. Slides the sacred items into the white cotton envelope. The fabric is thin and the…

The Nape of the Neck

I was scheduled to be naked at ten in the morning on Saturday. This was a conflict with my uber-religious community and my lifetime of body shame. I drove to the studio anyway. The artist…

The Blessing I Took

I never wanted a son.

I feel the heavy ugliness of those words like rough stones in my hands, taste them like shame on my tongue. Children have always been alien creatures to me, even when I was a child myself, and boy children, especially, have proven foreign and unrelatable.

Dealing with Difficult Questions

The stake presidency has asked the high council to address the topic “reduce and simplify our lives to minimize the commotion prophesied by the Lord.” I’ve felt impressed to talk about a different kind of com motion today, one that the Church and its members are facing in our information-saturated world, and a different kind of simplicity, one that is very elusive and that may take a lifetime to find. I hope you’ll forgive me for following a written text fairly closely, but I’m a writer, not a speaker, and because of the sensitive nature of the topic, I want to make sure I am as precise as possible. 

Being, A Household World

Did the Deuteronomist say, I have set before you plutocracy and democracy, therefore choose democracy? Or, I have set before you capitalism and socialism, therefore choose socialism? Or, I have set before you economics and ecology, therefore choose ecology? Or, I have set before you Earth System science or Gaia, therefore choose Gaia? Or, I have set before you acidifying oceans and fresh air, therefore choose fresh air? No, the Deuteronomist said none of those things. Instead, they said something both more compelling and more enigmatic: I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.

Bodies Material and Bodies Textual: Conflation of Woman and Animal in the Wilderness

As a woman myself, I often wonder about the daughters of Ishmael. What did they think when their father suddenly decided to leave Jerusalem and follow Lehi and his sons into the wilderness? How did they decide who would marry Nephi, Laman, and Lamuel? What was it like giving birth in the wilderness without the life-saving expertise of the midwives in Jerusalem? Did Sariah know enough to guide them through this harrowing experience?

The Earth and the Inhabitants Thereof (Non-)Humans in the Divine Household

In 2009, Elder David A. Bednar warned about potential pitfalls of digital spaces. Reminding listeners that the acquisition of our bodies was our primary reason for entering mortality, he said, “some young men and young women in the Church today ignore ‘things as they really are’ and neglect eternal relationships for digital distractions, diversions, and detours that have no lasting value”: eternity or bust. In immersive virtual environments like Second Life, the allure of the merely simulated—“the monotony of virtual repetition”—can substitute “for the infinite variety of God’s creations and convince us we are merely mortal things to be acted upon instead of eternal souls blessed with moral agency to act for ourselves.”

Reading the Word: Spirit Materiality in the Mountain Landscapes of Nan Shepherd

As a graduate student at the time of the 2016 presidential election, I felt the heightened tension of Utah’s vote and the ensuing schism as political and religious beliefs played out on a national stage that foregrounded environmental issues, such as the overturning of land designations for national monuments like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

“To Restore the Physical World”: The Body of Christ, the Redemption of the Natural World, and Mormonism’s Environmental Dilemma

In his article “Whither Mormon Environmental Theology?,” Jason M. Brown suggests that Mormon environmental scholarship and activism focuses on what he calls the “retrieval” of “earth-affirming doctrines” with the hope that the retrieval of these teachings “will foster more environmentally minded orthopraxis among the Mormon faithful.”Brown then goes on to suggest that those retrieved teachings about the earth can be divided into two traditions, the “stewardship tradition” and the “vitalistic tradition.”

Dominion in the Anthropocene

In the year 2000, Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen together with Eugene Stoermer published a short article in a professional newsletter cataloging the manifold ways that humans as a species have affected the geology and atmosphere of the planet. They wrote, “The expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of resources has been astounding” and then proceeded to list ways that humans have impacted the chemistry and functioning of local and planetary systems including the widespread transformation of the land surface, the synthetic fixing of nitrogen, the escape of gases into the atmosphere (including, importantly, greenhouse gases) by the burning of fossil fuels, the use of fresh water, increased rates of species extinction, the erosion of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, overfishing of the world’s oceans, and the destruction of wetlands.

Crossings | Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer & Motherhood (Not Necessarily in that Order)

Most books serve a specific purpose: to provoke emotions, to educate, or to entertain. Rarely do I find a book that’s simultaneously evocative, educational, and entertaining. Crossings is one of the few. From researching in…

The Sacrifice

Mnemosyne  She was still puzzled that the stars were not the same ones she knew. She cor rects. That she used to know. Where was Orion, its belt and sword glowing bright with mythic power…

What Shall We See?

I’m still haunted by a woman who died in our intensive care unit a decade ago. She was eighteen weeks pregnant and had a kidney infection serious enough that her lungs failed. She quickly ended up on maximal life support, barely surviving from day to day.

Reasonably Good Tidings of Greater-than-Average Joy | Grant Hardy, ed., The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition.

For serious readers of scripture, the publication of a major study edition is cause for great rejoicing. The HarperCollins Study Bible and the major Oxford Study Bibles (the Jewish Study Bible, the Catholic Study Bible,…

Sweater

Horizontal stripes 
black and white 

Timo’s Blessing

I remember that the sun shone warm but the air felt cool. A robin would have chirped in the branches that shaded my father, who was immersed in the savory smoke rising from the built-in…

A Personal Conversion | David C. Dollahite, God’s Tender Mercies: Sacred Experiences of a Mormon Convert

Brigham Young University School of Family Life professor David C. Dollahite’s memoir God’s Tender Mercies primarily focuses on Dollahite’s conversion, his mission to the Boston area, and his courtship and marriage to Mary Kimball. One…

Excerpts from Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

From “Homing”  In which our protagonist, a crabby aging mother and professor, drives from Salt Lake City to her father’s birthplace—Safford, Arizona—to visit an infant’s gravesite. Year: 2016.  Grandma Anderson said one of the best…

Queer Polygamy

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 33–43
Ostler addresses the problems with what she terms the “Standard Model of Polygamy.” She discusses how these problems might be resolved if it is put into a new type of model that she terms “Queer Polygamy.”

The Mother Tree: Understanding the Spiritual Root of Our Ecological Crisis

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
But the experience of women as women, their wilderness crescent,
is unshared with men—utterly other—and therefore to men, unnatural.

Well-Red

In my father’s small apartment in Salt Lake stood a bookshelf that nearly scraped the ceiling. Titles like The God Particle and The Story of Civilization rested next to each other, packed more than arranged,…

Heavenly Mother: The Mother of All Women

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 171-174
Heavenly Mother is a cherished doctrine among many Latter-day Saints.
Her unique esthetic of feminine deity offers Latter-day Saint women a
trajectory for godhood—the ultimate goal of Mormon theology.

Heretics in Truth: Love, Faith, and Hope as the Foundation for Theology, Community, and Destiny

I want to begin with a passage of startling—and unsettling—insight, from John Stuart Mill:

There is a class of persons . . . who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion. . . . This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.

On Solace

Charles Dickens suggests that epochs roll into one another in a cyclical pattern. Each cycle comprises the pairing of opposites: wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, Light and Darkness, virtue and vice, hope and despair.If Dickens is correct then the “best and worst of times” shall continue as humankind’s constant companions till the last syllable of recorded time. That being said, pillars of light occasionally descend, piercing the choking fog we currently inhabit. Those who witness them are appropriately named luminaries.

Creating a Zion Church

In Jacob we read eight times the Lord lamented that it grieved him to lose the branches of his vineyard. Surely it grieves him to lose those who have left the Church today. There are no studies necessary to tell us we are missing family members and old friends. Some left for good reasons—to preserve a family, for instance. But some left with little understanding of the gospel. They know what they don’t like but they don’t know what they are leaving.

Priesthood Power | Jonathan A. Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology

For the past decade-plus, Jonathan A. Stapley (b. 1976) has authored or co-authored a series of peer-reviewed article-length essays treating various aspects of LDS priesthood ritual (expressions of what he defines as liturgy). Though Stapley’s academic background is in science (he holds a PhD in food science from Purdue University), his interests have gradually shifted from developing bio-renewable natural sweeteners to tracing the serpentine contours of LDS liturgical history. This, his first book, represents an expansion of Stapley’s scholarly interests as well as a significant new contribution to LDS history.

The Black Cain in White Garments

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 209–211
Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society, chastity, and virtue. To Brigham, I was Cain’s curse. To McConkie, I was an unfaithful spirit, a “fence-sitter.” To you, I am colorless, my Blackness swallowed in that whiteness reclaimed, “a child of God.”

Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 201–208
“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual MLK March on Life held by BYU was ‘stop tiptoeing around the subjects of race, inequality, and inclusion. Many well intentioned white people in this country do not understand how the deeply rooted systems of racism and inequality function.’ He encouraged people to step up and do their own part for obtaining social justice for all.

Lost in Translation | Adam S. Miller, The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs

In my review of Adam Miller’s wonderfully imaginative and provocative book of criticism, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (2012), I stated: “At times, Miller seems as much poet as theologian. Essay after essay does what Robert Frost says poetry is supposed to do: ‘begin in delight and end in wisdom,’ although at times Miller’s essays begin in wisdom and end in delight. In reality, Miller’s writing is often theology as poetry.”

I’ve Got a Feeling

My dad gave me Hugh Nibley while I was in high school. His writing seemed to be a place set for me at the table of Mormonism. I dug into Nibley’s work and quoted my…

“Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry | Lance Larsen, What the Body Knows

What makes something a poem? How do you recognize one, even if it has no broken lines? For most of us who read and love poetry, the answer is, “I just know.” There is the buzz of new vision from a surprising metaphor or imaginative framing, the sensual delight of rhythm and rhyme. But even more, there is the feeling. A good poem sends sparks through our synapses, makes us feel more alive. “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” says Emily Dickinson. It’s visceral.

Nothing by Itself | George B. Handley, American Fork

It’s difficult to know where to start in discussing a novel as thoughtful as American Fork. Politics, religion, belonging, family history, ecology, sense of place, the high costs of love and our dogged willingness to pay…

Expertly Built: Stories within Stories | Tim Wirkus, The Infinite Future

Okay, I’m going to let the cat out of the bag, so if you don’t want the single, major twist of this novel spoiled, please walk away now. …  For those of you still here,…

Cry for the Gods: Grief and Return

Fires were raging in the hills near Hearst Castle in the late summer of 2016. They spread and spread, consuming the Monterey pines and golden hills of the most remote area of the California coast, extending close enough to the castle that, at last, tours were cancelled and plans were made to remove the most precious art. From the darkened dining hall, the orange shadow of the flame cast an eerie half-light on the stone walls which, for the first time since their construction, shone no light, were hid by no tapestries, echoed no sound. The Mediterranean towers and domes once spoke of the power of humanity’s conquest and wealth—now they stood abandoned, a desperate testament to the beauty humanity creates and is unworthy of.

Three Sealings

My mother made spiral-bound books for the first few of her nine children: pastel-colored accounts (which she wrote, illustrated, and laminated) of how we had made our way from the spiritual realm to the mortal;…

“A Portion of God’s Light”: Mormonism and Religious Pluralism

In 2015, the Catholic Church celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its landmark proclamation Nostra aetate. As one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate laid the foundation for contemporary Catholic interreligious engagement. Promulgated by Pope Paul VI, the document opened up multiple pathways to dialogue and identified the theological parameters within which these dialogues and collaborative projects could be undertaken.

Why I Stay

Dialogue 50.2 (Summer 2017): 209–213

“I was excommunicated from the Church in 1986. I am a gay man in a twenty-five-year-long relationship with my husband Göran Gustav-Wrathall. We were legally married in July 2008. Over the years, people have asked me how it is that I could consider myself Mormon if I’m not a member of the Church. What covenants are there for me to renew on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews, as I pass, without partaking, the sacrament tray to the person sitting next to me? To the extent that there is a relationship between me and God that has the Church as a context, real as it is to me, it is invisible to outside observers. That’s okay. I stay because I cannot deny what I know.”

Fresh Honesty in Authentic Mormon Identity | Jamie Zvirzdin, ed., Fresh Courage Take: New Directions by Mormon Women

An optimistic title and bright red pomegranate on the cover suggest a fresh approach to perennial gender problems in Mormonism— “a feminism that is about ‘cooperation and compassion.’” Fresh Courage Take is a positive motto…

Old Words, New Work: Reclamation and Remembrance | John Russell, The Mormoness; Or, the Trials of Mary Maverick: A Narrative of Real Events; Alfreda Eva Bell, Boadicea; the Mormon Wife: Life-Scenes in Utah; and Nephi Anderson, Dorian: A Peculiar Edition with Annotated Text & Scholarship

The continual rising interest in all things Mormon, whether they be historical, cultural, social, doctrinal, or even theological, has led to a number of interesting publication projects. The texts gathered in this review represent a…

Baring Imperfect Human Truths | Holly Welker, ed., Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage

We all know the Sunday School answers, but life rarely, if ever, plays out like a seminary video. So what do love, sex, and marriage look like in the lived experience of Mormon women? 

Journalist, poet, and “spinster who thinks and writes a great deal about marriage” (1) Holly Welker has compiled a collection of essays that unapologetically reveals the intersection of Mormon theology, culture, individuality, and relational living in her latest book, Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage.

“The Dean of Mormon History”: One Viewpoint | Gregory A. Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History

Greg Prince published David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism in 2005 to mostly critical acclaim. His study of Mormon historian Leonard J. Arrington is patterned after that work in its style, its…

Review: Laughter, Depth, and Insight: Enid Rocks Them All | Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Parts One and Two

When I was growing up, comic strips provided part of the ontology of my world. I devoured regular comic books, graphic novels, and other bubble-voiced media, but comic strips played a different and more important…

An Honorable Testament to a Legacy | Gregory A. Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History

Upon completing David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism in 2005, Greg Prince was uncertain of what his next project would be. After speaking in the Logan Tabernacle, he was approached by Susan…

The Garden of Enid: By a Mormon and For Mormons | Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Parts One and Two

At its core, Scott Hales’s two-volume graphic novel The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl is a coming-of-age-story through a Mormon lens. Self-proclaimed weird Mormon girl Enid is a misfit who feels equally…

A Candid and Dazzling Conversation | Patrick Madden, Sublime Physick: Essays

Patrick Madden’s second book of collected essays, following 2010’s Quotidiana (which won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award), bears the mark of…

The History that Dares Speak Its Name | J. Seth Anderson, LGBT Salt Lake

Seth Anderson’s slim book, part of Arcadia Publishing’s multi-volume Images of Modern America photographic series, is much more than an important new contribution to Utah and LDS history. It is a revelation— a surprising, unexpected…

Attempts to Be Whole | Scott Abbott, Immortal for Quite Some Time

In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brother’s death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that…

The Truth is in the Middle | Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood, Mormonism for Beginners

Introductory texts often face the challenge of which topics to cover and how much detail to include. In Mormonism for Beginners, author Stephen Carter and illustrator Jett Atwood strike the perfect balance between comprehensive survey…

Speaking for Herself | Ashley Mae Hoiland, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God

One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God is a collection of short missives—poems, essays, and autobiographical sketches— grouped loosely and thematically into thirteen sections and an epilogue. Ashley Mae Hoiland…

Invisible Men / Invincible Women | Eric Freeze, Invisible Men: Stories

The gaze of the girl on the cover of Eric Freeze’s short story collection arrested me—stopped me. Her eyes, full of hostility, told me that if I opened the book, I would be intruding. Her…

Bishop Johansen Rescues a Lost Soul: A Tale of Pleasant Grove

-0-  The grizzly, white-bearded weaver was as silent as the shadow of a ring-tailed civet cat—“reserved,” the folks in Pleasant Grove called the Russian. He did capable work making small throw rugs on a yew…

Flaming

One day, I woke up blinded by white light stinging my sleeping eyes. A thin, radiant line created by a break in my window blinds had been making a slow sojourn, day by day, across…

How to Build a Paradox: Making the New Jerusalem

The text the bishop suggested for my remarks today comes from Doctrine and Covenants 45:66: “And it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God.” This was a delicious topic for me to think about—the idea of a city on a hill, a heavenly city called Zion, is a subject that has occupied poets as often as it has prophets, and the vision of this city has inspired many of our loveliest hymns, which have been very pleasantly running through my head for weeks now. 

Deus Mea Lux Est: A Mormon Among Catholics

I am the Mormon among Catholics part of this equation. I was raised in Utah Valley—well I got taller, anyway. I got my undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University (BYU) and both of my graduate…

Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic Among Mormons

Although I was brought up in a Congregational church and my husband in an Episcopal church, after reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain in the early 1970s, we converted to Catholicism. There we found a spiritual home. I now help out in a seven-month class for those who want to become Catholic. Why is a Catholic from Seattle interested in Mormon history? My background includes Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It involves belief, dissent, and conversion, and then belief, dissent, and conversion all over again, with some large doses of persecution thrown in from time to time. 

Abundant Grace: The Humanness of Catholics and Latter-day Saints as a Basis for Friendship and Collaboration

At the conclusion of each Mormon History Association’s annual conference, there is a “devotional.” (Until I became a devotee of Mormon history, devotional was always an adjective, as in “devotional literature,” but the Latter-day Saints have shifted my grammatical foundations, and, because of my exposure to Mormons, I’ll never hear words like “fireside,” “garments,” or even “Jell-O” in the same way.) At these devotionals, I always look to see if my favorite LDS hymn is being featured—“The Spirit of God”—number 2 in the LDS hymnal.

Ordination and Blessing

I grew up in an anti-Catholic world. The first thing I remember hearing about Catholics in the small town in which I was raised was not just negative, it was extremely so. Everyone I knew was distrustful, suspicious, or hateful toward Catholics. When I joined the LDS Church at age ten, I heard more anti-Catholic sentiment, including the branding of the Catholic Church as “the Whore of Babylon,” and “the great and abominable church” or “church of the devil,” based on a biased reading of the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 13:6, 14:9).

Mormon/Catholic Dialogue: Thinking About Ways Forward

I would like to begin with an image. There is a tree in the middle of a barren field. A rod of iron extends from it. People jeer from a large building bounded by a river nearby. Those holding on to the rod ignore the jeering from the building and partake of the tree’s sweet fruit, but there are some who heed the jeering and become ashamed even after eating the fruit, and are lost. This image is intimately familiar to so many Latter-day Saints as Lehi’s dream from 1 Nephi 8 in the Book of Mormon. It is, however, a relatively new image for me. I did not grow up with the image.

Leveling the Earth, Expanding the Circle

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. 

A Conversation Begins | Stephen H. Webb and Alonzo L. Gaskill, Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation

There has never been any official theological dialogue between the Roman Catholic and LDS Churches, but Stephen H. Webb and Alonzo L. Gaskill have opened an unofficial one in Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation.…

Peck’s Peak | Steven L. Peck, Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck; Steven L. Peck, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist

If someone ever asks me what kinds of things Steven Peck writes, the best answer I can give goes like this: the BYU biology professor and raconteur writes primarily in the fields of evolutionary biology, speculative theology, literary fiction, computer modeling, poetry, existential horror, satire, personal essay, tsetse fly reproduction, young-adult literature, human ecology, science fiction, religious allegory, environmentalism, and devotional narrative. You know, that kind of thing.

Finding Mormon Theology Again | Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity

Wrestling the Angel is the first volume in Terryl Givens’s latest project on the “foundations of Mormon thought and practice” (ix). The first of a two-volume work, this book deals with theology while the subsequent…

A Not-So-Innocent Abroad | Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary

Craig Harline’s mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary, is a hilarious, heart-of-gold account of the highs and lows of the author’s experiences in the Belgium Antwerp Mission in the early 1970s. The story proceeds chronologically through the events of Harline’s mission call and training period in the old LTM, his arrival in Belgium and subsequent travails with uninterested Belgians, and his eventual return home as a slightly-older and probably-a-bit-wiser young man.

Theology for a New Age | John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God

The Church of England, the heir of a nineteen hundred year Christian tradition, has fallen upon evil days. At least such is the assessment of The Reverend Nicholas Stacey, Rector of Woolwich, in a recent…

Free Agency and Freedom — Some Misconceptions

Free agency is a fundamental theological principle of the Mormon religion. Freedom is a basic goal of the American political system. But they are not the same thing, and Mormons damage both principles through a…

An Honorable Surrender: The Experience of Conversion

Not infrequently a Mormon convert thinks back on those events and feelings which preceded his decision to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He may wish to recall these things not so…

“Man” and the Telefinalist Trap

Far too often, I suspect, when people begin to talk about men, their talk wells up out of strong feelings and emotional views and such talk pricks us deeply if we have contrary views. After…

The Moral Dimensions of Man: A Scriptural View

Like beauty, the moral nature of man is in the eye of the beholder; there is no one description of that nature that will prove acceptable to everyone. The view presented in this article is…

A Mormon Concept of Man

I Mormonism has often been described as the most completely indigenous of all the religions originating in America. The Mormon movement has been called the typical American religious movement. Mormons do not object to these…

Boy Diving Through Moss

A boy with joy and fear inside
stood on the plank
above the pond.
He sensed the cold, dark water
underneath,
and, daring,

Mental Gas

Charles to his teacher—Sir, you say
That nature’s laws admit decay—
That changes never cease ; 
And yet you say, no void or space ;
‘Tis only change of shape or place—
No loss, and no increase. 

The Church in Latin American: Progress and Challenge

Non-Catholic religious groups have been increasing at a rapid rate in Latin America since World War II. For example, during the five-year period, 1952-57, the number of Protestants expanded from 2,866,000 to 4,534,000—a fifty-eight per…

A New Look at Repentance: The Gift of Repentance

Except for the preaching of evangelists—whether of a Billy Graham or of the small holiness sects—one hears little of repentance in this secular age, and this is also true among Latter-day Saints. It is not…

A New Look at Repentance: The Miracle of Forgiveness

In The Miracle of Forgiveness, Elder Spencer W. Kimball, acting president of the Council of Twelve, has written an often moving, spiritually refreshing, and highly readable book. In attempting this book-length examination of the principle…

A New Look at Repentance: Some Thoughts on Repentance

Good old Judea [New Zealand], where I became a man (if I ever did become one). At the age of seventeen, I was young indeed to have had the experiences I had there, but they…

A New Look at Repentance: Guilt: A Psychiatrist’s Viewpoint

President Stephen L Richards, concerned with some of the psychiatric problems which had come to the attention of the First Presidency, asked if I had time to drop over. In the minute required to walk…

A New Look at Repentance: Encounter

That night I was sustained as bishop many students came to offer their congratulations. One couple added, “Bishop, we’re engaged!” I had not yet learned to catch that hint which actually meant, “Keep your eye…

Wanted: Additional Outlets for Idealism

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. We grow old only by deserting our ideals. . . . You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your…

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

Responses and Perspectives: Lester Bush’s Historical Overview: Other Perspectives

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 62–72
Responding to Bush, Thomasson wrote in response to Lester Bush’s Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Review which that article caused him to reflect on what he believes and so it became to be very valuable for him personally.

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 11–68
Lester Bush’s landmark article tells the most comprehensive history of the church’s teachings on race and priesthood, destabilizing the idea that it originated with Joseph Smith or had been consistently taught.

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen

Dr. Clinton F. Larson has been acclaimed as a Mormon poet, even as the first Mormon poet. In his review of The Lord of Experience Professor John B. Harris seems to have represented many of…

Personal Conscience and Priesthood Authority

From the teachings of its founder, Joseph Smith, down to the present time, Mormon doctrine has recognized two complementary, though sometimes competing, sources of authority in personal affairs. Through one source, the priesthood hierarchy, Latter-day…

A Mighty Change of Heart

I was born in the Church and have always been active in it—more or less. My conviction in the validity of its claims has vacillated over the years. Until recently there always had been in…

LDS Approaches to the Holy Bible

Davis Bitton, writing in 1966, noted that “there is no reliable study of Mormon exegesis. .. . I can think of no single area of exploration which promises to be so fruitful in understanding the…

Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair

Few chapters in twentieth-century Mormon thought are more thought-pro voking than the events following B. H. Roberts’ efforts to publish what he considered his greatest work, that synthesis of science and religion, The Truth, the…

The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought

The Mormon belief that the individual spirit of man existed in the presence of God before the creation of the world is unique in modern Christianity. Mormons have rejected the Creator/creature dichotomy of Patristic theology…

The Adam-God Doctrine

On April 9, 1852, Brigham Young rose once again to address a session of general conference. He intended to preach several discourses, he said, and as the Deseret News observed the following week, “the Holy Ghost [rested] upon [him] in great power, while he revealed some of the precious things of the kingdom.”

“Moonbeams From a Larger Lunacy”: Poetry in the Reorganization

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 22–31
This study addresses poetry within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and defines an RLDS poet as someone who belongs to the RLDS church and who has published poetry in some form or other.

The New Mormon Poetry | Lewis Home, The seventh day

A new Mormon poetry is beginning to emerge from the shadow of traditional, more bardic Mormon verse. Peeping about in the bright sun, blinking a bit and rubbing its eyes, it shows itself in poems…

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

The Ward Teacher

On the first Sunday after my fourteenth birthday, I was given the responsibility to watch over the Church and see that all the members did their duty, and also to prevent iniquity, hardness with each…

God of Our Fathers

God gave David nightmares. The flame-eyed giant hurling thunderbolts from the mountain of heaven, hair and beard blown back by the storm of righteous wrath—it was he who haunted the boy. *** David knew his father…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Same Religion, Different Churches

If you want to learn how to have a successful interfaith marriage, I have to start by telling you as a social psychologist that I don’t recommend marrying outside your faith. Although I have been…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Two Faiths, Two Baptisms

I like the exotic ring to saying, “I married a Lutheran minister.” Heads turn. Conversations start. I like to think I rebelled against narrow parochial views, made a statement about cultural pluralism. I like to…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: From Here to Eternity?

My marriage in 1968 to a man who was not a member of the Church has been instrumental to my growth and development not only as a person but also as a Latter-day Saint. In…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: One View of Interfaith Marriage

Five years ago I would never have imagined that I would marry outside of the Church, let alone that I would discuss the experience in public. The number of people who will read this does not…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Eternity with a Dry-Land Mormon

I’ve heard them called both dry Mormons and dry-land Mormons. They are people who live intimately among the Mormons without becoming members of the Church. They are a puzzling lot because they often behave so…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Introductory Remarks

In any religion that stresses the importance of marriages between its members, choosing to marry someone of another faith is not a casual act. In fact, marrying outside the home faith is likely to incur…

Baptism for the Dead: Comparing RLDS and LDS Perspectives

Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 99–105
Underwood discusses why two religions who share the same exact upbringing have different opinions about the temple rituals.

The Concept of Grace in Christian Thought

The concept of grace and its relation to individual salvation is prob ably the most debated issue in the history of Christian thought. The list of combatants is virtually a Who’s Who in Christian thought:…

Heart of the Fathers

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…

A Teenager’s Mormon Battalion Journal | David L. Bigler, ed., The Gold Rush Diary of Azariah Smith

Since the publication of the Hosea Stout Journals in 1964, the University of Utah Press has made a significant contribution to the study of western history by publishing a number of important diaries, journals, and letter collections. The Gold…

A New Synthesis | Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830-1846

Exiles in a Land of Liberty is part of the University of North Carolina’s “Studies in Religion” series. The author, Kenneth H. Winn, is a relative newcomer to Mormon studies and, if this book is…

Mormonism’s First Theologian | The Essential Parley P. Pratt with foreword by Peter L. Crawley

At least one Latter-day Saint in the early days of the Church truly understood what it means to have the heavens open and God speak after centuries of silence. Par ley Parker Pratt, one of…

Utah’s Original “Mr. Republican” | Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics

I first encountered Reed Smoot more than two decades ago while researching the life and political career of Parley P. Christensen, a Utah political maverick who became the Farmer-Labor party nominee for president in 1920.…

A Poetic Legacy | Clarice Short, The Owl on the Aerial

If Clarice Short had not chosen to become a great educator, she might have developed into a major poet. Her poetic output, excellent in quality but admittedly limited, reveals her as a woman dedicated to her…

Clawson and the Mormon Experience | David S. Hoopes and Ray Hoopes, The Making of a Mormon Apostle: The Story of Rudger Clawson

In 1879 a young Mormon missionary named Rudger Clawson watched as an anti-Mormon mob in Georgia killed his companion. Through bluff and bravado Clawson survived the assault and brought his companion’s body back to church…

Delusion as an Exceedingly Fine Art | Franklin Fisher, Bones

About fifteen years ago, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher invited Franklin Fisher, a young and aesthetically bearded professor of English at the University of Utah, to read from his novel in progress at a gathering of the…

Two Covenant Systems | Rex Eugene Cooper, Promises Made to the Father: Mormon Covenant Organization

Historians of American religion often see a connection between Mormons and Puritans, if only because most early Saints came from New England. However, many studies which have mentioned similarities between these religions have done so…

A Song Worth Singing | Michael Hicks, Mormonism and Music: A History

Anyone who has worked with Mormon music has likely experienced the frustration of being unable to learn much about its past —such things as composers, per formers, and institutional policy and practice. Collections of folk…

Glimmers and Glitches in Zion

An eight-year-old Mormon can tell you a lot about Zion. At least I could. In response to Sister Jensen’s questions in Targeteer class, I’d raise my hand to give my rote answer: “Zion is a…

Becoming Mormon: The Elkton Branch, 1976-81

On the second Sunday of December 1976, Cloyd Mullins and his two sons, Lynne Whitney and her four children, Bill and Ellen Lilley and their two small children, a pair of missionaries, and Karl Tippets…

A Closer Focus: Challenges in Doing Local History

The sweep of wide-angle Mormon history is impressive, offering a comprehensive panorama of the Church’s worldwide workings, progress, and achievements. But to see Mormon history only through this wide-angle lens is to miss the rich…

AIDS: The Twentieth-Century Leprosy

Typically, when an individual contracts a disease, friends and relatives rally to provide needed support. Even terminal illnesses, though reminders of our own mortality, elicit comfort and sympathy. Friends and family form support groups, dispense…

Judaism and Mormonism: Paradigm and Supersession

For some time now, especially since World War II and the shock and guilt evoked in the Western world by the virtual extermination of the European Jews, traditional Christian views of the role of the…

Heavenly Father or Chairman of the Board?: How Organizational Metaphors Can Define and Confine Religious Experience

Many Latter-day Saints worry that as the Mormon Church has become more corporate in nature, it has not retained its strictly religious focus. Some have argued that its extensive financial holdings have made the Church…

On Spectral Evidence

October 3, 1992, the first day of the 162d semiannual LDS general conference, was the 300th anniversary of the action that finally stopped the Salem witch trials. Those trials, perhaps the greatest blot on American religious devotion, had resulted in the deaths of twenty people, all of whom vigorously proclaimed their innocence to the end. 

Dissent in the Church: Toward a Workable Definition

There are many in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who believe we need a workable definition of religious dissent in order to help make way for more serious debate over its legitimacy…

A Response to Paul Toscano’s “A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love Not Power”

When I first read Paul Toscano’s jeremiad I thought it was too harsh and angry. But on revisiting it three years later I say, “Yes!” to many of his points; for the ones I quibble…

A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love Not Power

One of the ironies of my life is that I decided in 1963 to leave the Catholic church as it was becoming more open to join the Mormon church as it was becoming more closed.…

Liberal Spirituality: A Personal Odyssey

“Liberal spirituality” is the title and theme of this essay. A double entendre is intended—suggesting the interdependence of a free and abundant spiritual life. My aim is to explore the nature and possibilities of liberal spirituality by reflecting on some of the key experiences and major ideas that have shaped my philosophy. I am concerned here with the essential values at the core of religious experience, a state of mind and an approach to life. The Mormon church has been but one of the anvils against which I have forged my identity. 

Dialogue Toward Forgiveness: A Supporting View

Mine is the interesting challenge to comment on “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology/’ The bill of particulars that Lavina Fielding Anderson has presented is comprehensive and disturbing, her recommendations are…

The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology

Dialogue 26.1 (Spring 1993): 23–82
The clash between obedience to ecclesiastical authority and the integrity of individual conscience is certainly not one upon which Mormonism has a monopoly. But the past two decades have seen accelerating tensions in the relationship between the institutional church and the two overlapping subcommunities I claim—intellectuals and feminists.

Faith, Hope, and Charity

It seems to me that the whole difficulty of our friendship was reflected in our names. It wasn’t that we had feuding surnames—certainly no Capulets and Montagues—but in fact the conflict was more fundamental because…

Easter Service

“The earth turns, the sun rises. It’s quite simple.”  We turned towards the high peaks to the east—cold, and still smooth and clean with snow, the half-circle of rising sun warming our faces. I squinted…

Epiphany

We had been up there for two months when the clouds came in. It hap pened overnight. When I crawled into my sleeping bag the night before, the air was dry and clear. The mountain…

The Unexpected Choice

“Mrs. Greer, you must abort your baby.” The words wrapped me in horror. They offered a solution worse than the problem could ever be. I had cancer, now I was pregnant, and Dr. Krueger wanted…

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

Any discussion of Mormon culture or doctrine in the work of nationally prominent American poet May Swenson must begin with the caveat that Swenson, for virtually all of her adult life, was not a believing…

W.H. Chamberlin and the Quest for a Mormon Theology

[1]It is time to resurrect W. H. Chamberlin. Chamberlin lived the life of an intellectual and spiritual pilgrim. With little money he filled a mission to the Society Islands and later served as mission president…

Zion-building: Pondering a Paradigm | James W. Lucas and Warner P. Woodworth, Working Toward Zion: Principles of the United Order for the Modern World

Zion-building as the formation of social institutions based on principles purportedly underlying Mormon United Orders has repeatedly captured the attention of scholars, re formers, practitioners, and church leaders over the past 150 years. The variety…

The Celestial Kingdom

Julie was asked to be baptized for the dead. Her teacher, Mrs. Dixon, had read down the roll, asking the girls in alphabetical order. She had moved into Julie’s neighborhood, just up the street in…

Luke 7:37

The alpha and omega sat at meat. 
The woman could not speak. She only knelt 
And wept. Translucent tears upon his feet 
Flowed like river waters to the Delta. 

Give Me That Old Time Testimony Meeting

Maybe it is just sentimental musing, but I think that I remember a time when things were, well, messy. I remember testimony meetings where the eccentric ramblings of older members consumed large chunks of time,…

Hosannah

“I looked it up last night.” Elaine stopped conducting our choir practice to ask if we knew what Hosannah meant.  It was dark out, almost 10:00 p.m., and the canyon winds blew cold for October…

Stealing the Reaper’s Grim: The Challenge of Dying Well

I first encountered death at age three when my infant brother, after only one day of life, succumbed to respiratory failure. I have few memories of the viewing, but do recall the delicate blue veins on the side of his infant scalp. There was great sorrow in the chapel. But, as the years passed, his death became an abstraction. Now, over three decades later, after witnessing a fair amount of human suffering and death, both through personal experiences and my professional role, the process of dying is no longer an abstraction to me. I have, in fact, become a reluctant authority. 

An Expanded Definition of Priesthood? Some Present and Future Consequences

Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 319–325
But the fact that we must look at organizational dynamics before we can begin to understand the issues that would be raised by expanding priesthood to include women is an apt commentary on the complex and sometimes confused role that priesthood authority has come to play in the modern church.

Women and Priesthood

I smiled wryly at the cartoon on the stationery. The picture showed a woman standing before an all-male ecclesiastical board and asking, “Are you trying to tell me that God is not an equal opportunity…

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

There once was a time, albeit brief, when a “Negro problem” did not exist for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During those early months in New York and Ohio no mention was even made of Church attitudes towards blacks. The Gospel was for “all nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples,” and no exceptions were made. A Negro, “Black Pete,” was among the first converts in Ohio, and his story was prominently reported in the local press. W. W. Phelps opened a mission to Missouri in July, 1831, and preached to “all the families of the earth,” specifically mentioning Negroes among his first audience. The following year another black, Elijah Abel, was baptized in Mary land.

Seers, Savants and Evolution: The Uncomfortable Interface

Ever since his great synthesis, Darwin’s name has been a source of discomfort to the religious world. Too sweeping to be fully fathomed, too revolutionary to be easily accepted, but too well documented to be…

The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young

The brethren testify that brother Brigham Young is brother Joseph’s legal successor. You never heard me say so. I say that I am a good hand to keep the dogs and wolves out of the…

Nauvoo Roots of Mormon Polygamy, 1841-46: A Preliminary Demographic Report

Polygamy, marriage to more than one spouse at a time, cannot be seen in the fossil record of our primitive ancestor, Homo erectus, and no one knows if Lucy of the African Rift, reputed to…

The Development of the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony

Dialogue 34.1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 87

However, the temple has maintained its central role in the lives of
Latter-day Saints by being able to create a point of intersection between
human desires for righteousness and the divine willingness to be bound
by covenant. This point has remained constant, even though emphases
in the church have changed over time, also bringing change to the en￾dowment ceremony itself

Selling the Chevrolet: A Moral Exercise (vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 1983)

This is the saddest story I have ever told. Not because The Chevrolet is gone, but because it probably is not. 

This much is known. During the Christmas season of 1973, Gene and Charlotte England traveled to Salt Lake City from Northfield, Minnesota. They made the trip in The Chevrolet—a brown stationwagon of uncertain origin.

Two Trains and a Dream

I. October 8, 1908: A Train

Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading 
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet, 
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit 
to Boston, with his traveling companion.

The Weeping God of Mormonism

[1]In the book of Moses, revealed to Joseph Smith in 1830 as part of his re vision of the Bible, we learn of a prophet named Enoch, who is called to preach repentance to his…

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass 
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force, 
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails. 

On Fidelity, Polygamy, and Celestial Marriage (vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 1987)

This is an essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea—the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy—that has important religious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and…

Blessing the Chevrolet (vol. 9, no. 3, Fall 1975)

At various times I have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t until I found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my Chevrolet that I really felt what that experience meant to those early Saints, who depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things. 

Eugene England: Our Brother in Christ

Brigham Young said there never was a time when he did not know Joseph Smith. What Brigham meant, I believe, is that when he first met Joseph Smith there was such a deep and immediate…

A Dining Room Table

If the tapestry that is my intellectual and spiritual life, Eugene Eng land’s influence not only figures as a prominent color, but helps to shape the pattern of the weave itself. Many of the moments…

A Brief Tour of England: My Year with Gene

We in Utah Valley State College’s Center for the Study of Ethics were sardines, but we were happy sardines. Our office (formerly a mythical beast called a “faculty lounge”) housed the chair of the humanities…

Blood Sports

This is how I see it. I find it to be a dark side of Mormonism, pervasive and insidious in character. Young men, in some cases young women, are socialized into blood sports. Youth in…

Song of Shiblon

I am twenty-one years old.

I lie in the golden light of a Korean September afternoon. I have curled myself up on the musty, avocado-skinned sofa that occupies a large corner of the living room. A small living room in a small apartment, which occupies the floor above a cosmetics store that seems to sell only furniture.

Last Supper

“Have you heard the really bad news?” my editor, Doc, asked almost off handedly as he wound the film in his camera. 

Then came that pause.

God, Man, and Satan in The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Brady Udall has given the same sort of message to readers of his fiction. In an interview with the journal Irreantum, Udall said, “I don’t want to teach readers a lesson of any kind. I simply want them to have a hair raising, heart-thumping, mind-numbing, soul-tearing experience.”

Without Mercy? Neil LaBute as Mormon Artist: A consideration of Your Friends and Neighbors, Bash, The Mercy Seat, and The Shape of Things

Philip Roth once noted that American writers were divided into two camps: “palefaces,” followers of the refined genteel tradition of Henry James and William Dean Howells with their elevated sensibilities and decorous language, and “redskins”…

Righteousness Express: Riding the PG&R

A new litmus test of righteousness has swept the church: the shunning of all R rated and the de facto acceptance of all PG and PG-13 movies. I don’t like litmus tests. They are too…

Alive in Mormon Poetry

The summer 2002 edition of Irreanteum: Exploring Mormon Literature is de voted to the theme of environmental writing in LDS theology and culture. It features poems solicited by guest editor Todd Petersen by several contemporary…

Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture

When the above notice appeared in the Improvement Era in September 1933, it did not seem out of place in a publication intended for the general church membership. In the same issue of the Improvement Era, Theodore E. Curtis posted a notice for another collection of poetry. Its announcement included endorsements from notable leaders of the church: 

Editor’s Introduction: Wicks, Modems, and the Winds of War

Standing as we still do on the brink of a new millennium, Latter-day Saints share with their neighbors and friends across the globe a profound interest in the fortunes of twenty-first-century war and peace. Not only do we wish to live our lives and raise our children under a quiet sky in safety and peace, far from the addictive savagery to which humankind sinks in time of war, but as an increasingly international church committed to sending missionaries into all the countries of the world, who could dispute the advantages if all those countries were at peace?

A Tribute for Service Well Rendered

The Bishop in Neal Chandler’s story “The Call” counsels a young man: “It’s not easy to be a real writer. . . .” How true, especially when you want, as did the bishop in Neal’s…

A Motherless Son Sings the Blues | Paul Swenson, Iced at the Ward, Burned at the Stake

Last spring I wrote an essay for the March 2004 AML symposium in which I argued that the most effective poets writing from the LDS culture are those who provide a counterweight to the main…

Not a Coveyesque Self-Help Book | Ronald W. Walker, Qualities That Count: Heber J. Grant as Businessman, Missionary, and Apostle

Collections of scholarly articles often display their strengths in their parts rather than in their functioning as a unified whole. After all, the structure of such volumes invites readers to pick and choose and, if…

The Province of the Extreme | Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Krakauer’s success has come as a writer of narrative nonfiction. He is best known for Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (New York: Villard,1997). In Under the Banner of Heaven:…

Salvation

3 She held the umbrella close to her head, limiting her vision to the circle of stones at her feet. Anna watched her companion’s hemline bounce in time to the click of her heels against…

At Bay

There are no waves on the bay side of the peninsula. The tide simply licks up and back, up and back on the sand shore. Beyond the shore, tall sailboats of vivid blues, greens, and…

An Interview with David Sjodahl King

David S. King has led a life exceptional for its combination of public and ecclesiastical service. His parents were Vera Sjodahl King (1891-1955) and William Henry King (1862-1949), a four-term U.S. Senator from Utah. Born…

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

When I read Robert Hughes’s essay, “Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture,” published in a recent Dialogue,[1] I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to respond. But like a sliver that goes at first unnoticed and later…

Without Number

And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. . . . And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. Moses…

Roses

The evening before Jim Wilson’s family moved, he and Bob Olding rode their bikes down to the Provo River to swim one more time. The last five boys were just leaving the hole, so Bob…

Like the Lilies of the Field

I float in the corner of the university diving pool. My legs, which are more muscular and dense than my torso, pull me down. Closing my eyes, I’m rocked by the wake from a diver. Sound disappears with my ears under water. I arch my belly and lift my heavy legs higher. My body is buoyed up in a manner that feels like faith. 

poetry on the ‘fridge door

my mother is madly licking 
at the languid red peach, 
screaming at life and 
the rust crush of death. 

The 1948 Secret Marriage of Louis J. Barlow: Origins of FLDS Placement Marriage

Dialogue 40.1 (Spring 2007): 83–136
Watson explains how the secret marriage of Louis J. Barlow to a 15-year-old girl caused a major rift among fundamentalists. Today’s fundamentalist members are still experiencing the effects of that marriage.

Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy

With the Utah War’s sesquicentennial commemoration now underway, it is appropriate to reexamine that campaign’s origins, conduct, significance, and historiography. This article’s purpose is to stimulate such probing. I hope to do so through the story of my own research and conclusions about the war over the past half-century—one-third of the period since President James Buchanan and Governor Brigham Young came into armed conflict during 1857-58.

The Theology of Desire

A friend who is a soprano once related a story to me of a rime when she was accompanied by a male pianist. They worked together on the piece for some weeks; and finally, when they performed, the ecstatic release, the sense of the flowing together of their spirits, was, in her words, “like making love.” 

Brattle Street Elegy: Holding a Master Key

Heresy, I know, but . . . it was a quirky old building that didn’t work very well. While I would never have chosen to tear it down, after the fire the only architectural feature…

Brattle Street Elegy: Treasures

I started attending the chapel at 4 Longfellow Park in 1969 when I was a freshman at Wellesley College. It was my introduction to Mormon life, since I had joined the Church in Illinois at…

Brattle Street Elegy: Anchored with Meaning

This church building has heard so many songs and souls. It has witnessed so much painful and redemptive spiritual journeying. Freud and Darwin were welcomed right along with the Three Witnesses. In the chapel I…

Brattle Street Elegy: My Personal Brand of Weirdness

In 1967 when I was eight years old, my family moved from Salt Lake to Cambridge. The building on Longfellow Park quickly became a symbol for what I had brought with me from Utah: a…

Brattle Street Elegy: Especially the Friends

So many memories! It would take a book to record them all.

I was there from 1976 to 1983 and returned many times, including a three-and-a-half month visit in 1997.

Brattle Street Elegy: Homeless Memories

The Longfellow Park building was as quirky and original as its congregants. I hope the church will use this fire as an opportunity to build a more orthodox, rectangular, “Mormon” building in Cambridge and hopefully…

Brattle Street Elegy: Spiritually Housed

I’m presently a member of the Longfellow Park First Ward and have been here since 2006. I know it’s just a building, but the Longfellow Park Chapel was one of the reasons I knew Boston…

Brattle Street Elegy: So Glad, So Sad . . .

I was baptized in that church. I was a member of the University and Longfellow Park I wards. This is such sad news. I am glad to hear everyone is okay. I am sad to…

Brattle Street Elegy: Wonderful Small Things

My mother sent me the link to this blog site and she has posted here as well. Linda Hoffman Kimball and Chris Kimball met in the Longfellow Park building that fell yesterday. I am the…

Brattle Street Elegy: Falling in Immediate Love

I first visited Longfellow Park in 1994 when I was investigating colleges, and I immediately fell in love . . . in love with the architectural symbolism of the building, like the tiered, round window…

Brattle Street Elegy: Always Sacred

I first arrived in late August 1990. Two weeks earlier, I had undergone a conversion experience that had jolted me from world weary agnosticism to a fervent belief in God and the Restoration. Simultaneously I…

Brattle Street Elegy: We Should Do A Study

It is a great pleasure for me to be here with all of you Cambridge veterans and to be asked to represent the huge cohort of LDS women who have sat in these pews—those who have preceded me and those who have come after me. What an opportunity this has been to recall some of my happiest and most vivid memories. What happened to me here? Just about everything important that has happened in my long and eventful life. 

Hermeneutic Adventures in Home Teaching: Mary and Richard Rorty

When philosopher Alastair MacIntyre came striding into my Vanderbilt University office brandishing the New York Times in October of 1985, I knew something was up. “Congratulations,” he said, “your church has just entered its Renaissance period.” I was used to seeing him walk into Furman Hall on Ash Wednesdays with a gray streak on his forehead, and we had talked about Mormonism, but I had no clue what he was talking about. He showed me the front page of the paper. It was the Mark Hofmann bombings—murders to cover up Hofmann’s forgeries. “It only took you 150 years,” Alastair noted. “It took us a millennium and a half.” 

Divine Darwinism, Comprehensible Christianity, and the Atheist’s Wager: Richard Rorty on Mormonism—an Interview with Mary V. Rorty and Patricia Rorty

Cranney: Richard mentions in Philosophy and Social Hope the dangers of fundamentalist religions and the extent of their political influence. Where did Mormonism fit on the fundamentalist continuum? 

Mary Rorty: That’s a very interesting question because that’s something that has changed a great deal in my lifetime. The thought that Mormonism now considers itself in part an ally of the Evangelical Protestant movement is a surprise to many people, and that’s certainly not the side of Mormonism to which Richard had been exposed. 

Cranney: Were there any specific instances . . . Of course, he died before Proposition 8 in California.

Hidden Treasures

Shortly after my family and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, three years ago, my six-year-old son invited a neighbor boy over to play. The neighbor asked if they could go geode hunting in the wooded creek behind our house. I did not know what geodes were or what kind of artillery might be required to hunt them, but I sent the boys out with my blessing, hoping they could not get into too much trouble. A little while later, I saw them staggering out of the woods, splattered with mud and clay. They were carrying a heavy rounded rock, which they dumped unceremoniously on the porch. 

Too Long Ignored | Ronald G. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe for Zion

Although George Darling Watt (1812–81) is perhaps best known in the LDS Church as the first convert in the British Isles, he also recorded Brigham Young’s sermons in shorthand for more than sixteen years, preserving…

Characters to Care About | Jonathan Langford, No Going Back

Google “gay” and “Mormon” these days, and you’ll be flung— headfirst—into a veritable deluge of vitriol and sanctimony. Of course, it didn’t start with California’s Proposition 8. No, that river’s path pushes back, through the…

Re-Creating the Bible | William C. Bishop, B. G. Christensen, Samantha Larsen Hastings, Sarah Jenkins, Eric W. Jepson, Ryan McIlvain, Danny Nelson, and Arwen Taylor, The Fob Bible

Lately the Bible has been getting a bum rap. Christopher Hitchens calls it “a nightmare”and blames it for much of humanity’s suffering—everything from sexism to genocide. At the same time, literalist approaches to the Bible have produced narrow theology and tendentious, unscientific speculation.

The Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered | Beverley Clack and Brian R. Clack, The Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Introduction

This introduction to the philosophy of religion, originally published in 1998, is fully revised and updated in the 2008 edition. The authors, Beverly Clack and Brian R. Clack are, respectively, reader in theology, philosophy and…

El Problema del Dolor/The Problem of Pain

Buenos días, hermanos y hermanas. Para los que no me conocen, me llamo Cristian Anderson. Nací en el Lago Salado, Utah, y viví allí hasta los 18 años cuando fui a San Francisco para estudiar biología. Después de un año de estudios salí de misión a Houston Sur en el estado de Texas. Al regresar a la universidad conocí a mi esposa, Marina Capella. Ella nació en Los Ángeles y pasó la mayor parte de su vida en un suburbio que se llama Fontana, hasta que salió a estudiar en la misma universidad que yo. Nos conocimos en octubre y nos casamos en septiembre del siguiente año en el Templo de San Diego, hace 7 años. Todavía somos estudiantes, pero en menos de dos meses Marina recibirá su doctorado de médica pediatra y vamos a mudarnos a Boston, al otro lado del país donde ella estudiará medicina en Harvard y yo trabajaré en el Museo de Historia Natural. 

In Lieu of History: Mormon Monuments and the Shaping of Memory

As a missionary in France and Belgium, I frequently encountered devout Catholics who would describe their journeys to Lourdes or Fatima. “Ah, oui! J’ai vu la grotte, la grotte où la Vierge s’est apparue à Bernadette! J’étais lá!” While these humble women, dressed in robin-egg-blue housecoats, could not bring home a piece of the cross, they could show me their holy water, rosary beads, or skinned knees, emblems of their devotion and commitment. Their pilgrimage was no trite tourist trip. They didn’t watch the spectacle with ironic detachment, rolling their eyes at the commodification of sacred space. Non! They walked on holy ground. I nodded and smiled. But I confess that the stories amused me. Holy water indeed. 

Wives and Other Women: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon

John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon were the three eldest sons of George Q. Cannon, the man viewed by historians as second only to Brigham Young in prominence in late nineteenth-century Mormon Utah. George Q. Cannon was a man of unusual talents and skills, whose far-flung influence extended to ecclesiastical, political, literary, journalistic, and business matters in Utah and the West, and each of the three sons inherited much of their father’s brilliance, culture, and charisma.

Joseph Smith’s Letter from Liberty Jail as an Epistolary Rhetoric

Joseph Smith may not have ever spoken the word “rhetoric,” but his participation in juvenile debating societies probably brought him some contact with rhetoric’s long tradition.Regardless of his knowledge of this tradition, it is obvious that Smith knew how to persuade people through speech and writing. In addition, his writings instruct readers about how to persuade in a manner consistent with the restored gospel of Mormonism.

The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr

Dialogue 43.4 (Winter 2010): 1–42
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a robust methodology that eliminates the guesswork in determining winding locations by visual inspection of crease marks or lacunae features, and to determine whether the missing interior section of the Hôr scroll could have been long enough to accommodate the Book of Abraham. Fortunately, this is a question that can be definitively answered by examining the physical characteristics of the extant portions of the scroll. The haste and greed of Michael Chandler provide the key to unlocking this mystery.

A Sacrament of Stewardship

Carrol and Edwin Firmage contributed papers to the fall issue that review Mormon history during the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries and scriptural precedent, in an attempt to motivate a Mormon audience toward improved ecological fidelity: Edwin Firmage Jr., “Light in Darkness: Embracing the Opportunity of Climate Change” and Carrol Firmage, “Preserves” (43, no. 3 [Fall 2010]: 100–127 and 128–65). 

“Take No Thought”

You’re going to miss it. You’re distracted. Sit up straight. You’re not paying attention. 

God does not come and go—your attention does. 

All sins are just variations on that same desire to do something else when you’re already doing something. Multitaskers are children of the devil. You can’t serve two masters. Divided attention is just dressed-up inattention.

Immortal for Quite Some Time (an excerpt)

I’m Lila, a heat-drugged woman announces, edging her weight out of an overstuffed room into the hall. How can I help you? I explain we are his family. She says she is sorry. He seemed like such a nice man. 

The Discursive Construct of Virtual Angels, Temples, and Religious Worship: Mormon Theology and Culture in Second Life

Cyberspace is changing the way religion is practiced in contemporary society. A 2004 Pew Internet and American Life project estimated that 64 percent of American internet users go online for spiritual or religious purposes.Religious organizations large and small are increasingly participating in cyberspace; and according to Peter Horsfield, the influence of digital media is producing major consequences for religious institutions and ideologies. 

Mormon and Queer at the Crossroads

Dialogue 44.1 (Spring 2011): 53–84
This essay explores conflicting messages within LDS teaching on LGBT rights, when it both opposed same-sex marriage and in the wake of Prop 8 also came out in support of other LGBT rights that display both wrath and mercy. It explores a theory of LDS teachings on homosexuality along these lines, as well as the context of shifting norms around sexual identity.

The Early Mormon Chain of Belonging

On March 10, 1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith preached a sermon after the burial of his friend King Follett, killed by accidental rock-fall while building a well. To an assembled crowd of his followers, Smith proclaimed, “If you have power to seal on earth & in heaven then we should be crafty. . . . Go & seal on earth your sons & daughters unto yourself & yourself unto your fathers in eternal glory . . . use a little Craftiness & seal all you can & when you get to heaven tell your father that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven. I will walk through the gate of heaven and Claim what I seal & those that follow me & my Council.” 

Scry Me a River | George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

Terry Tempest Williams saved my life. As a BYU undergraduate suffering from late winter doldrums back in 1993, I heard her claim that you don’t really know your own place if you don’t know the local birds. She had no idea, but she had just slapped defibrillator paddles on my heart. I was a long-time birder but hadn’t been birding for months.

Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder | William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858

In this first volume of a planned two-volume documentary history of the Utah War, editor William P. MacKinnon has assembled a treasure house of previously unexploited documents to illuminate the decisions, actions, and bungling on…

Image and Reality in the Utah Zion | Polly Aird, Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861

Just as national histories are always written by the victors, religious narratives are often written by those who remain within the fold. The common tropes of conversion, devotion, dedication through trials, and faithfulness until death…

To Bless and Sanctify: Three Meditations on the Sacrament

Kris Wright, Baking a Sacrament Prayer
Matthew Bowman, This Is My Body: A Mormon Sacrament
Kristine Haglund, Holy, Holy, Holy

On Vital Questions | Robert L. Millet, ed., By What Authority? The Vital Question of Religious Authority in Christianity

Opening his short contribution to this collection of essays, Roger Olson, professor of theology at Baylor University, writes: “One can hardly do justice to the subject of religious authority in a brief reflection essay” (180).…

Harrell’s Mettle | Jack Harrell, A Sense of Order and Other Stories

How do you read a collection of short stories by one author? Do you curl up with the book the same way you would with a novel, reading one story after another until your leg falls asleep or your stomach growls for food or the phone rings? Do you read one story, then close the book to think about it, perhaps reopening the book to reread parts or the whole? Do you expect the stories to be connected by characters or theme or tone and therefore search for universal elements? Do you come to each story afresh, hungry for wonder and new insights? 

Pomp, Circumstance, and Controversy | Richard E. Bennett, Susan Easton Black, and Donald Q. Cannon, The Nauvoo Legion in Illinois: A History of the Mormon Militia, 1841–1846

From its gorgeous dust jacket to its prosaic index, this valuable book provides narrative history, data compilations, and unexploited documents shedding light on one of the most unusual, controversial organizations of antebellum American military his tory, the short-lived Nauvoo Legion of Hancock County, Illinois. In the process, the authors add to our understanding of the violent forces that led to the 1844 assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith as well as the subsequent westbound Mormon exodus from Nauvoo, then one of the largest cities in Illinois.

Immortal for Quite Some Time, Part 2

(after the autopsy, after the funeral, after AIDS)

I’ve started to read John’s missionary letters from Italy. Nearly one a week for two years. From what Mom told me when I asked about them, I expected requests for money, reports of trouble, and depressed silences. John communicated all of that, of course; but his letters are profoundly uplifting as well (or is it fraternal nostalgia I’m feeling?).

“Wholesome, Hallowed, and Gracious”: Confronting the Winter’s Night

In northern Europe, where our celebration of the Christmas season has its roots, the winter nights are long, dark, and foreboding and, at least in myth, teeming with unwelcome mysteries. It was against this backdrop that the early Christian monks and missionaries transformed the pagan Yuletide festivals into our modern Christmas celebration. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the physical and spiritual darkness of winter seemed, for many, to be lifted at the Christmas season. 

Inside the “Loyal Opposition” | Philip Lindholm, ed., Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority

Few books convey the pain and poignancy of Mormon ecclesiastical discipline as compellingly as Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority, a newly published paperback from Greg Kofford Books. The volume is the product of editor Philip Lindholm’s conversations with several prominent Mormons whose writings and speeches have provoked the ire of the LDS Church. While these dissidents’ recollections and reflections take center stage in Latter-day Dissent, Lindholm uses their stories to advance a reinterpretation of Mormon intellectual history.

Can Mormonism Have a Systematic Theology? | Charles Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology

This is a wide-ranging and detailed book, consisting of an extensive examination of a wide variety of topics in Mormon theology from the time of scripture to the present. Harrell announces his methodology in the…

Canon: Open, Closed, Evolving | David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America

Sacred Borders represents a rigorous and compelling consideration of various traditions about the state of the biblical canon in American religion. For bookish Latter-day Saints, this volume will provide much-needed context for early Mormon beliefs about their open canon as well as a subtle and sympathetic view of both sides of the debate over the closed canon.

Scaling Never

There are so many kinds of never. There’s the never that Jacob’s Mum uses when she says, “Never talk to strangers; it’s dangerous,” and there’s the never his Dad uses when he says, “Never play…

from “A Paris Journal”

July 5, 2009. What an idea, a Sunday outdoor market in Paris featuring not antiques, imported fruit, or cast-off clothing, but birds. As good a way as any to worship, so we take a quick…

Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures

Let me start with an explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide phenomenon with a presence in more than 150 countries, and more members and more growth outside the United States than within it. 

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology

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. 

On “Praying with Your Feet”

I’m grateful for this invitation to speak to your quorum.

My objective today is to tell you about my faith journey and offer up some observations and possible conclusions. I’m going to speak the only way I know how: honestly and with complete candor. It means making myself vulnerable in front of group I don’t know well (yet), but we think you have a right to know your new stake presidency. If you sustain us as your leaders, then it seems you have a right to know exactly what it is you are sustaining.

Faith and Doubt in the First-Person Singular | Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel; Robert Rees, ed., Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons; and Thomas Riskas, Deconstructing Mormonism:An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith

In 1979, Mary Bradford published in these pages an important personal essay on personal essays. Titled “I, Eye, Aye,” the piece first outlines a brief history of the genre within Mormon letters and then offers its…

God as Engineer | A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman, eds., Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision

Albert Einstein famously wrote: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.” Einstein did not believe in a personal God, of course, but A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman do, and ask the same questions in their book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision. Written from the point of view of faithful LDS scientists and engineers, Bushman and Howe (an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab) attempt to tackle a question that has long fascinated me: what can we learn if we analyze God’s creations as the master work of the master Engineer?

Personal Revelation Narratives: An Interview with Tom Mould

Shawn Tucker conducted this interview with Tom Mould in April, 2013, in Elon, North Carolina. In 2011, Utah State University Press published Tom’s book Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition. Shawn is Tom’s colleague at Elon University, and Tom interviewed Shawn as part of his field work. A brief excerpt of the book follows the interview (reprinted with the kind permission of the Utah State University Press). 

America and the One True Church: What My Church Taught Me about My Country

Precious few Americans outside the South know much about my church—the Church of Christ—and that’s a shame, since it illumines so well the character of the American nation. Because my church is relatively small (c.…

“Questions at the Veil”

In the months after September 11, 2001, essayist and poet Frederick Turner crafted an unpublished tale entitled “The Terrorist Goes to Paradise.” 

Told in the first person by the terrorist himself, the story recounts the glories and privileges that greet an operative who helped fly a jet into New York’s towering World Trade Center. Upon his arrival in heaven the terrorist discovers to his pleasure that, for his heroism, as he presumes, Allah has provided him with all his fantasies and more: movement without restriction, un encumbered by time; scenes of beauty surpassing mortal ability to express; seventy-two voluptuous virgins enacting without restraint his every whim; infinite, incomparable food without satiation; a ministering angel attending to his every request and answering every query. It is all . . . heavenly.

Matter Made Graciously Present | Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

Once philosophy was not even taught at BYU for fear of corrupting the youth and Mormonism has had a famously rocky relationship with theology. But as with Mormon Studies in general, we are in the…

The Gift of Tongues

Dead. The rose bushes, the dogwood, the spirea, and the green spreading yews, all dead: the entire hillside, a dusty memorial to her beautiful yard. The dry leaves crumbled between Mary’s fingers and fell into…

An Interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner

Rabbi Harold Kushner is the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, along with numerous other books addressing the relationship between religion and lived adversity. He served as the congregational rabbi at the Temple Israel of Natick for over twenty-five years. Gregory A. Prince cofounded Virion Systems, Inc., a biotech company dedicated to the prevention and treatment of pediatric diseases. He is the author of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism as well as several other books on the history of the priesthood.

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Two poems that I read during my sophomore year of college ended up changing my life. The first of these, John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” changed it quickly by helping me decide to change my major from accounting to English. It wasn’t so much that I was impressed with Keats for being such a good writer as much as I was impressed with myself for being such a good reader and for sort of understanding “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It made me feel smart, perhaps for the first time in my life, and I decided that I liked feeling smart and wanted to spend the rest of my time in college understanding poems and feeling like a genius. So I majored in English. In fact, I majored in English three times. As a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and, eventually, as a professor of English literature I continued to teach “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in a variety of courses more or less the same way that I originally understood it the first time I read it. 

Deep Cheer

Nine years ago, my husband Kyle was offered an attractive job at Tulane University in New Orleans. At the same time, he was offered—and ultimately accepted—a position at Indiana University. Six months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and Tulane shut down for an extended period. If Kyle had accepted that job, we likely would have been displaced indefinitely from home and work and schools. We felt empathy for those who suffered, and we thanked our lucky stars that we had dodged this bullet.

Divertissement

His death being end-stopped 
never justifies 
the enjambment 
of my survival 
that goes on and on, 

Bo Knows Heaven

So there’s my sort-of-neighbor big Bo, who despite owning two rock-solid Scandinavian names including, yes, Bo, doesn’t exactly seem to have things rock-solidly together.

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Over ten years ago, blogs changed the look, feel, and immediacy of Mormon discourse almost overnight. The ongoing lively conversations, brilliantly constructed posts, and sometimes even unruly debates have not stopped since. Dialogue both views and participates in this online dialogue, submitting archival references to current discussions and writing pieces in concert with the printed prose found within its present-day pages.

What Shall We Do with Thou? Modern Mormonism’s Unruly Usage of Archaic English Pronouns

What shall we do with thou? If this question grates on your ear, it may be because you recognize that thou is a nominative pronoun (a subject) and therefore never follows a preposition. If it doesn’t grate, then you are living, breathing evidence of the difficulties presented by archaic second-person pronouns in twenty-first-century Mormonism.

Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Quest for Respectability

Almost two decades have elapsed since I published The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). My book began by acknowledging and illustrating the “Americanization” thesis advanced by others— namely that the LDS Church and religion had spent the first half of the twentieth century in a deliberate policy of assimilation with American society and was thus following the time-honored trajectory traced by such early scholars as Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber—from a peculiar and disreputable sect toward a respectable church, increasingly comfortable with the surrounding American culture.

For All His Creations of Which I’m a Part: Buddha Nature, Neo-Animism, and Postmodern Mormonism

When my parents died, I inherited our family’s Buddhist altar, or butsudan. It now sits in my living room in Lexington, Massachusetts. I pray before it about twice a month. I burn a stick of incense and ring a small brass bell. I close my eyes, and thank my ancestors for what they have given me. Usually, I do this with my youngest son, Kan, who is now three years old.

Charity on the Rocks

My husband grew up backpacking, and it was one of the conditions of our marriage that I would learn to backpack too. I do it now, and occasionally even enjoy it, but it’s definitely a stretch to say that I’m good at it or love it as wholeheartedly as Mike does; backpacking is perpetually a challenge for me, and my favorite part is the end of the day when I collapse in our tent with my Kindle. I say this by way of prefacing a personal story so that you understand the context as I start telling you about a time when nature nearly got the best of me. 

Of Cups and Councils

My mother died recently from complications of Alzheimer’s. Because four of my siblings live near my parents and were helping my dad with arrangements, my sister Carol and I decided to fly on Sunday for the Tuesday morning service and then stay longer after the funeral. We arrived at my dad’s apartment Sunday afternoon, anticipating some quiet hours of reminiscing or just relaxing. 

Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes | David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics; Richard Davis, The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics; and Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

The term “liberalism” with all its rhetorical permutations—self-identifying as a “liberal,” defending principles of “liberty,” showing “liberality” in one’s interactions with others, etc.—is a contested concept in America. It’s both an adjective and a noun.…

What Kind of Monster

What kind of monster spits a wad of gum in a urinal?
Blue. Brain-folded.  
Pregnant with identifying evidence. 
DNA. Marks from teeth  

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

It is early evening in ancient Jerusalem, and a beautiful young Jewish woman, recently wed, carries a small bundle of clean clothing and a linen towel. Her sandals pad against the limestone pathway that borders the synagogue. She is on her way to the community mikvah, a font-like, open-air, recessed pool designed for ritual bathing, where a few other women may or may not already be waiting their turn. This is a devotion the women of her faith observe once a month, seven days after their menstrual cycle ends, in order to be “purified from [their] uncleanness,” to use the words from 2 Samuel, chapter 11. While the mikvah is enclosed for the privacy and protection of the women, it’s still possible for someone with a particular vantage point—say, someone on the roof of the king’s palace, perhaps—to illicitly watch a woman complete her ritual, to watch her disrobe and completely immerse herself in the sanctified waters of the mikvah before she emerges to dress herself in fresh clothing. Thus, according to her obedience to the law, the young wife Bathsheba is restored to purity. 

The Struggle for Female Authority in Biblical and Mormon Tradition

Dialogue 48.2 (Summer 2015): 1–57
Although race and gender are connected in 2 Nephi 26:33, the historical origins of the gender ban have not yet been addressed with the same degree of attention in Church discourse.

Adam Had an Eden

in mankind is the end of kind 
in woman the beginning of woe 

By the Mouth of Two or Three

If the world were truly and wholly sullen, 
the starlings would never sing—never. 

They would see only blood in the clouds 
of sunrise and sunset and hold their peace

Living and Dying in the Realm of Forgetful People

God once asked a murderer about the location of his victim. The murderer evaded the question by posing another: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“After the Body of My Spirit”: Embodiment, Empathy, and Mormon Aesthetics

Nearly thirty-five years ago, Merrill Bradshaw wrote: “It seems almost unbelievable that after all these years of the development of Mormon thought we still have no genuine Mormon aesthetic theory.”Such a statement might initially strike the reader as a bit out of date considering the abundance of writing on Mormon aesthetics since Bradshaw penned those words.However, that very abundance illustrates the existence of an ongoing conversation about Mormon aesthetics that reflects the difficulty Bradshaw mentions.

& the day that i believe is known as pentecost to some

(((some 50 days later)))  
nostalgia tempts us—to long for early spring and the newly risen—
the surprise at the open tomb 
the gingersnaps & the whoopie pies & today 

A Question of Authority

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…

So Then They Are No More Twain, But One: An Exploration of Liminality

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,…

The Quest for Mutual Empathy in the Gospel

Relational–cultural theory suggests that the primary source of suffering for most people is the experience of isolation and that healing occurs in growth-fostering connection. Judith V. Jordan “For as the body is one, and hath…

O Magnum Mysterium

I’ve heard many women say that the day their child was born was the best day of their life, but it was the worst day of mine. After laboring for nearly forty hours, my body…

Model Cars Are Not Cars (And Theories of Atonement Are Not Atonement)

If you mistake a model car for a real car, you’re going to have problems. I spent much of my life making that mistake in my thinking about atonement. I had read that “God’s justice…

Rethinking Revelation

When I was about twelve, yet another retelling of the Cinderella story was released into theatres in a magic-free but nonetheless magical version called Ever After. One of my favorite scenes in this film involves…

Second Place: Pressed Palms

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. —Romans 12:2 One spring weekend, with a six-­month-­old…

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. Michael Reed’s 2012 book Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo sets out an excellent account of the uncomfortable relationship between the Church…

On the Value of Doubt

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

Dear Heavenly Mother

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 167
I am encouraged by small changes, but change takes time. For now, I will speak your name. I will make you part of our eternal narrative. I will share your love and stop myself from looking past you. I will teach my children to see your light and be lifted by your strength, that they will speak your name as easily as they do Father’s—for both of you are part of their eternal makings.

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

Got Wheat? Christopher James Blythe, Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse

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…

Ceci n’est pas une Mormon Studies Book Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

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.…

The Casting Out of Spirits

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…

Getting the Cosmology Right

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…

The Words and Worlds of Smith and Brown Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism

In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed what was intended to be the crowning accomplishment of physics—an experiment to determine how movement through the luminiferous ether changed the speed of light. What they found…

Spirit of Pentecost

Instead of unremitting lucha libre, I desired détente between my sexuality and birth faith. A gap between graduation from law school and starting work opened a unique space for spiritual odyssey. I resumed attending church…

Thoughts on the Sacrament During a Pandemic

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,…

Review: “Babbling on toward Ephemeral Patterns” Patrick Madden, Disparates

Alphabetize yourkarma, sever your qigong,jinx your wifi code. Disparates, 134 I want to suggest that Disparates is less disparate than it claims to be, that there is a running theme or a coherent message that…

Rubik’s Palimpsest: Searching for My Indigeneity

From my youth I was blessed with a God-shaped hole in my identity. I knew I came from somewhere, that my ancestors were whole and bore a cultural armor that it was my right to…

Confession

I’m not making excuses, Bishop, I’m really not. What I did, it’s inexcusable. Reprehensible. I broke sacred vows. I totally crossed the line, and I’m sorry for that. All that stuff. But the thing I honest-to-gosh don’t get is why my husband’s so hot and bothered about it unless it maybe bruised his big fat little ego. Yes, I told him. A week ago. At first he went all Incredible Hulk on me—eyes bulging, face bloating. From there it was the Grim Weeper: “How could you have done this to me? To us!” Meanwhile I’m wondering who’s this wonderful fairy tale us he’s talking about?

Archive of the Covenant: Reflections on Mormon Interactions with State and Body

Dialogue 53.4 (Winter 2020): 79–107
In the logic of Mormon theology, an internal lack of faith is in part a result of the mismanagement of my mortal embodiment. Part of the reason that the “born this way” language of the marriage equality movement has had so little effect on the Mormon population compared to others is that it directly contradicts very recent and revered theological claims.

Pray Without Ceasing

The scriptures often admonish us to pray continuously. Note that I said “continuously,” not “continually.” “Continually” means repeated with interruptions, but “continuously” means without interruptions. Paul tells the saints in Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing”…

Elegy for the Eaten

To the Ones who
Awakened the Universe with a word
And set the Cosmos afire.

A Blessing for Starting Over

First, bless the burst of anger; its force will get you free.

Then, bless the tears that follow; they will provide new sight.

Bless your bare feet as you put them on the earth. Run.

Three Dogs in the Afterlife

that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there ª waits while ● gets her bearings. It always takes a little while, he says. ● lifts her spirit nose, trying and…

Performative Theology: Not Such a New Thing

A movement called “scriptural theology” has been part of academic theology for some time now, since the 1980s or earlier.[1] In spite of that, with some exceptions I will note, it has had little impact…

What the Second Coming Means to People Like Me

A few of you will remember Carl Poll, who served maybe three decades ago as bishop of the Palo Alto Ward. In 1967 his brother, historian Richard Poll, visited Palo Alto and gave a sacrament…

Certain Places

He folds his sash, his apron, his robe. Stacks them on the cold laminate counter. Places the cap on top. Slides the sacred items into the white cotton envelope. The fabric is thin and the…

The Nape of the Neck

I was scheduled to be naked at ten in the morning on Saturday. This was a conflict with my uber-religious community and my lifetime of body shame. I drove to the studio anyway. The artist…

The Blessing I Took

I never wanted a son.

I feel the heavy ugliness of those words like rough stones in my hands, taste them like shame on my tongue. Children have always been alien creatures to me, even when I was a child myself, and boy children, especially, have proven foreign and unrelatable.

Dealing with Difficult Questions

The stake presidency has asked the high council to address the topic “reduce and simplify our lives to minimize the commotion prophesied by the Lord.” I’ve felt impressed to talk about a different kind of com motion today, one that the Church and its members are facing in our information-saturated world, and a different kind of simplicity, one that is very elusive and that may take a lifetime to find. I hope you’ll forgive me for following a written text fairly closely, but I’m a writer, not a speaker, and because of the sensitive nature of the topic, I want to make sure I am as precise as possible. 

Being, A Household World

Did the Deuteronomist say, I have set before you plutocracy and democracy, therefore choose democracy? Or, I have set before you capitalism and socialism, therefore choose socialism? Or, I have set before you economics and ecology, therefore choose ecology? Or, I have set before you Earth System science or Gaia, therefore choose Gaia? Or, I have set before you acidifying oceans and fresh air, therefore choose fresh air? No, the Deuteronomist said none of those things. Instead, they said something both more compelling and more enigmatic: I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.

Bodies Material and Bodies Textual: Conflation of Woman and Animal in the Wilderness

As a woman myself, I often wonder about the daughters of Ishmael. What did they think when their father suddenly decided to leave Jerusalem and follow Lehi and his sons into the wilderness? How did they decide who would marry Nephi, Laman, and Lamuel? What was it like giving birth in the wilderness without the life-saving expertise of the midwives in Jerusalem? Did Sariah know enough to guide them through this harrowing experience?

The Earth and the Inhabitants Thereof (Non-)Humans in the Divine Household

In 2009, Elder David A. Bednar warned about potential pitfalls of digital spaces. Reminding listeners that the acquisition of our bodies was our primary reason for entering mortality, he said, “some young men and young women in the Church today ignore ‘things as they really are’ and neglect eternal relationships for digital distractions, diversions, and detours that have no lasting value”: eternity or bust. In immersive virtual environments like Second Life, the allure of the merely simulated—“the monotony of virtual repetition”—can substitute “for the infinite variety of God’s creations and convince us we are merely mortal things to be acted upon instead of eternal souls blessed with moral agency to act for ourselves.”

Reading the Word: Spirit Materiality in the Mountain Landscapes of Nan Shepherd

As a graduate student at the time of the 2016 presidential election, I felt the heightened tension of Utah’s vote and the ensuing schism as political and religious beliefs played out on a national stage that foregrounded environmental issues, such as the overturning of land designations for national monuments like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

“To Restore the Physical World”: The Body of Christ, the Redemption of the Natural World, and Mormonism’s Environmental Dilemma

In his article “Whither Mormon Environmental Theology?,” Jason M. Brown suggests that Mormon environmental scholarship and activism focuses on what he calls the “retrieval” of “earth-affirming doctrines” with the hope that the retrieval of these teachings “will foster more environmentally minded orthopraxis among the Mormon faithful.”Brown then goes on to suggest that those retrieved teachings about the earth can be divided into two traditions, the “stewardship tradition” and the “vitalistic tradition.”

Dominion in the Anthropocene

In the year 2000, Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen together with Eugene Stoermer published a short article in a professional newsletter cataloging the manifold ways that humans as a species have affected the geology and atmosphere of the planet. They wrote, “The expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of resources has been astounding” and then proceeded to list ways that humans have impacted the chemistry and functioning of local and planetary systems including the widespread transformation of the land surface, the synthetic fixing of nitrogen, the escape of gases into the atmosphere (including, importantly, greenhouse gases) by the burning of fossil fuels, the use of fresh water, increased rates of species extinction, the erosion of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, overfishing of the world’s oceans, and the destruction of wetlands.

Crossings | Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer & Motherhood (Not Necessarily in that Order)

Most books serve a specific purpose: to provoke emotions, to educate, or to entertain. Rarely do I find a book that’s simultaneously evocative, educational, and entertaining. Crossings is one of the few. From researching in…

The Sacrifice

Mnemosyne  She was still puzzled that the stars were not the same ones she knew. She cor rects. That she used to know. Where was Orion, its belt and sword glowing bright with mythic power…

What Shall We See?

I’m still haunted by a woman who died in our intensive care unit a decade ago. She was eighteen weeks pregnant and had a kidney infection serious enough that her lungs failed. She quickly ended up on maximal life support, barely surviving from day to day.

Reasonably Good Tidings of Greater-than-Average Joy | Grant Hardy, ed., The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition.

For serious readers of scripture, the publication of a major study edition is cause for great rejoicing. The HarperCollins Study Bible and the major Oxford Study Bibles (the Jewish Study Bible, the Catholic Study Bible,…

Sweater

Horizontal stripes 
black and white 

Timo’s Blessing

I remember that the sun shone warm but the air felt cool. A robin would have chirped in the branches that shaded my father, who was immersed in the savory smoke rising from the built-in…

A Personal Conversion | David C. Dollahite, God’s Tender Mercies: Sacred Experiences of a Mormon Convert

Brigham Young University School of Family Life professor David C. Dollahite’s memoir God’s Tender Mercies primarily focuses on Dollahite’s conversion, his mission to the Boston area, and his courtship and marriage to Mary Kimball. One…

Excerpts from Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

From “Homing”  In which our protagonist, a crabby aging mother and professor, drives from Salt Lake City to her father’s birthplace—Safford, Arizona—to visit an infant’s gravesite. Year: 2016.  Grandma Anderson said one of the best…

Queer Polygamy

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 33–43
Ostler addresses the problems with what she terms the “Standard Model of Polygamy.” She discusses how these problems might be resolved if it is put into a new type of model that she terms “Queer Polygamy.”

The Mother Tree: Understanding the Spiritual Root of Our Ecological Crisis

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
But the experience of women as women, their wilderness crescent,
is unshared with men—utterly other—and therefore to men, unnatural.

Well-Red

In my father’s small apartment in Salt Lake stood a bookshelf that nearly scraped the ceiling. Titles like The God Particle and The Story of Civilization rested next to each other, packed more than arranged,…

Heavenly Mother: The Mother of All Women

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 171-174
Heavenly Mother is a cherished doctrine among many Latter-day Saints.
Her unique esthetic of feminine deity offers Latter-day Saint women a
trajectory for godhood—the ultimate goal of Mormon theology.

Heretics in Truth: Love, Faith, and Hope as the Foundation for Theology, Community, and Destiny

I want to begin with a passage of startling—and unsettling—insight, from John Stuart Mill:

There is a class of persons . . . who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion. . . . This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.

On Solace

Charles Dickens suggests that epochs roll into one another in a cyclical pattern. Each cycle comprises the pairing of opposites: wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, Light and Darkness, virtue and vice, hope and despair.If Dickens is correct then the “best and worst of times” shall continue as humankind’s constant companions till the last syllable of recorded time. That being said, pillars of light occasionally descend, piercing the choking fog we currently inhabit. Those who witness them are appropriately named luminaries.

Creating a Zion Church

In Jacob we read eight times the Lord lamented that it grieved him to lose the branches of his vineyard. Surely it grieves him to lose those who have left the Church today. There are no studies necessary to tell us we are missing family members and old friends. Some left for good reasons—to preserve a family, for instance. But some left with little understanding of the gospel. They know what they don’t like but they don’t know what they are leaving.

Priesthood Power | Jonathan A. Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology

For the past decade-plus, Jonathan A. Stapley (b. 1976) has authored or co-authored a series of peer-reviewed article-length essays treating various aspects of LDS priesthood ritual (expressions of what he defines as liturgy). Though Stapley’s academic background is in science (he holds a PhD in food science from Purdue University), his interests have gradually shifted from developing bio-renewable natural sweeteners to tracing the serpentine contours of LDS liturgical history. This, his first book, represents an expansion of Stapley’s scholarly interests as well as a significant new contribution to LDS history.

The Black Cain in White Garments

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 209–211
Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society, chastity, and virtue. To Brigham, I was Cain’s curse. To McConkie, I was an unfaithful spirit, a “fence-sitter.” To you, I am colorless, my Blackness swallowed in that whiteness reclaimed, “a child of God.”

Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 201–208
“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual MLK March on Life held by BYU was ‘stop tiptoeing around the subjects of race, inequality, and inclusion. Many well intentioned white people in this country do not understand how the deeply rooted systems of racism and inequality function.’ He encouraged people to step up and do their own part for obtaining social justice for all.

Lost in Translation | Adam S. Miller, The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs

In my review of Adam Miller’s wonderfully imaginative and provocative book of criticism, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (2012), I stated: “At times, Miller seems as much poet as theologian. Essay after essay does what Robert Frost says poetry is supposed to do: ‘begin in delight and end in wisdom,’ although at times Miller’s essays begin in wisdom and end in delight. In reality, Miller’s writing is often theology as poetry.”

I’ve Got a Feeling

My dad gave me Hugh Nibley while I was in high school. His writing seemed to be a place set for me at the table of Mormonism. I dug into Nibley’s work and quoted my…

“Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry | Lance Larsen, What the Body Knows

What makes something a poem? How do you recognize one, even if it has no broken lines? For most of us who read and love poetry, the answer is, “I just know.” There is the buzz of new vision from a surprising metaphor or imaginative framing, the sensual delight of rhythm and rhyme. But even more, there is the feeling. A good poem sends sparks through our synapses, makes us feel more alive. “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” says Emily Dickinson. It’s visceral.

Nothing by Itself | George B. Handley, American Fork

It’s difficult to know where to start in discussing a novel as thoughtful as American Fork. Politics, religion, belonging, family history, ecology, sense of place, the high costs of love and our dogged willingness to pay…

Expertly Built: Stories within Stories | Tim Wirkus, The Infinite Future

Okay, I’m going to let the cat out of the bag, so if you don’t want the single, major twist of this novel spoiled, please walk away now. …  For those of you still here,…

Cry for the Gods: Grief and Return

Fires were raging in the hills near Hearst Castle in the late summer of 2016. They spread and spread, consuming the Monterey pines and golden hills of the most remote area of the California coast, extending close enough to the castle that, at last, tours were cancelled and plans were made to remove the most precious art. From the darkened dining hall, the orange shadow of the flame cast an eerie half-light on the stone walls which, for the first time since their construction, shone no light, were hid by no tapestries, echoed no sound. The Mediterranean towers and domes once spoke of the power of humanity’s conquest and wealth—now they stood abandoned, a desperate testament to the beauty humanity creates and is unworthy of.

Three Sealings

My mother made spiral-bound books for the first few of her nine children: pastel-colored accounts (which she wrote, illustrated, and laminated) of how we had made our way from the spiritual realm to the mortal;…

“A Portion of God’s Light”: Mormonism and Religious Pluralism

In 2015, the Catholic Church celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its landmark proclamation Nostra aetate. As one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate laid the foundation for contemporary Catholic interreligious engagement. Promulgated by Pope Paul VI, the document opened up multiple pathways to dialogue and identified the theological parameters within which these dialogues and collaborative projects could be undertaken.

Why I Stay

Dialogue 50.2 (Summer 2017): 209–213

“I was excommunicated from the Church in 1986. I am a gay man in a twenty-five-year-long relationship with my husband Göran Gustav-Wrathall. We were legally married in July 2008. Over the years, people have asked me how it is that I could consider myself Mormon if I’m not a member of the Church. What covenants are there for me to renew on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews, as I pass, without partaking, the sacrament tray to the person sitting next to me? To the extent that there is a relationship between me and God that has the Church as a context, real as it is to me, it is invisible to outside observers. That’s okay. I stay because I cannot deny what I know.”

Fresh Honesty in Authentic Mormon Identity | Jamie Zvirzdin, ed., Fresh Courage Take: New Directions by Mormon Women

An optimistic title and bright red pomegranate on the cover suggest a fresh approach to perennial gender problems in Mormonism— “a feminism that is about ‘cooperation and compassion.’” Fresh Courage Take is a positive motto…

Old Words, New Work: Reclamation and Remembrance | John Russell, The Mormoness; Or, the Trials of Mary Maverick: A Narrative of Real Events; Alfreda Eva Bell, Boadicea; the Mormon Wife: Life-Scenes in Utah; and Nephi Anderson, Dorian: A Peculiar Edition with Annotated Text & Scholarship

The continual rising interest in all things Mormon, whether they be historical, cultural, social, doctrinal, or even theological, has led to a number of interesting publication projects. The texts gathered in this review represent a…

Baring Imperfect Human Truths | Holly Welker, ed., Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage

We all know the Sunday School answers, but life rarely, if ever, plays out like a seminary video. So what do love, sex, and marriage look like in the lived experience of Mormon women? 

Journalist, poet, and “spinster who thinks and writes a great deal about marriage” (1) Holly Welker has compiled a collection of essays that unapologetically reveals the intersection of Mormon theology, culture, individuality, and relational living in her latest book, Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage.

“The Dean of Mormon History”: One Viewpoint | Gregory A. Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History

Greg Prince published David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism in 2005 to mostly critical acclaim. His study of Mormon historian Leonard J. Arrington is patterned after that work in its style, its…

Review: Laughter, Depth, and Insight: Enid Rocks Them All | Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Parts One and Two

When I was growing up, comic strips provided part of the ontology of my world. I devoured regular comic books, graphic novels, and other bubble-voiced media, but comic strips played a different and more important…

An Honorable Testament to a Legacy | Gregory A. Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History

Upon completing David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism in 2005, Greg Prince was uncertain of what his next project would be. After speaking in the Logan Tabernacle, he was approached by Susan…

The Garden of Enid: By a Mormon and For Mormons | Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Parts One and Two

At its core, Scott Hales’s two-volume graphic novel The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl is a coming-of-age-story through a Mormon lens. Self-proclaimed weird Mormon girl Enid is a misfit who feels equally…

A Candid and Dazzling Conversation | Patrick Madden, Sublime Physick: Essays

Patrick Madden’s second book of collected essays, following 2010’s Quotidiana (which won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award), bears the mark of…

The History that Dares Speak Its Name | J. Seth Anderson, LGBT Salt Lake

Seth Anderson’s slim book, part of Arcadia Publishing’s multi-volume Images of Modern America photographic series, is much more than an important new contribution to Utah and LDS history. It is a revelation— a surprising, unexpected…

Attempts to Be Whole | Scott Abbott, Immortal for Quite Some Time

In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brother’s death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that…

The Truth is in the Middle | Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood, Mormonism for Beginners

Introductory texts often face the challenge of which topics to cover and how much detail to include. In Mormonism for Beginners, author Stephen Carter and illustrator Jett Atwood strike the perfect balance between comprehensive survey…

Speaking for Herself | Ashley Mae Hoiland, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God

One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God is a collection of short missives—poems, essays, and autobiographical sketches— grouped loosely and thematically into thirteen sections and an epilogue. Ashley Mae Hoiland…

Invisible Men / Invincible Women | Eric Freeze, Invisible Men: Stories

The gaze of the girl on the cover of Eric Freeze’s short story collection arrested me—stopped me. Her eyes, full of hostility, told me that if I opened the book, I would be intruding. Her…

Bishop Johansen Rescues a Lost Soul: A Tale of Pleasant Grove

-0-  The grizzly, white-bearded weaver was as silent as the shadow of a ring-tailed civet cat—“reserved,” the folks in Pleasant Grove called the Russian. He did capable work making small throw rugs on a yew…

Flaming

One day, I woke up blinded by white light stinging my sleeping eyes. A thin, radiant line created by a break in my window blinds had been making a slow sojourn, day by day, across…

How to Build a Paradox: Making the New Jerusalem

The text the bishop suggested for my remarks today comes from Doctrine and Covenants 45:66: “And it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God.” This was a delicious topic for me to think about—the idea of a city on a hill, a heavenly city called Zion, is a subject that has occupied poets as often as it has prophets, and the vision of this city has inspired many of our loveliest hymns, which have been very pleasantly running through my head for weeks now. 

Deus Mea Lux Est: A Mormon Among Catholics

I am the Mormon among Catholics part of this equation. I was raised in Utah Valley—well I got taller, anyway. I got my undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University (BYU) and both of my graduate…

Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic Among Mormons

Although I was brought up in a Congregational church and my husband in an Episcopal church, after reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain in the early 1970s, we converted to Catholicism. There we found a spiritual home. I now help out in a seven-month class for those who want to become Catholic. Why is a Catholic from Seattle interested in Mormon history? My background includes Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It involves belief, dissent, and conversion, and then belief, dissent, and conversion all over again, with some large doses of persecution thrown in from time to time. 

Abundant Grace: The Humanness of Catholics and Latter-day Saints as a Basis for Friendship and Collaboration

At the conclusion of each Mormon History Association’s annual conference, there is a “devotional.” (Until I became a devotee of Mormon history, devotional was always an adjective, as in “devotional literature,” but the Latter-day Saints have shifted my grammatical foundations, and, because of my exposure to Mormons, I’ll never hear words like “fireside,” “garments,” or even “Jell-O” in the same way.) At these devotionals, I always look to see if my favorite LDS hymn is being featured—“The Spirit of God”—number 2 in the LDS hymnal.

Ordination and Blessing

I grew up in an anti-Catholic world. The first thing I remember hearing about Catholics in the small town in which I was raised was not just negative, it was extremely so. Everyone I knew was distrustful, suspicious, or hateful toward Catholics. When I joined the LDS Church at age ten, I heard more anti-Catholic sentiment, including the branding of the Catholic Church as “the Whore of Babylon,” and “the great and abominable church” or “church of the devil,” based on a biased reading of the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 13:6, 14:9).

Mormon/Catholic Dialogue: Thinking About Ways Forward

I would like to begin with an image. There is a tree in the middle of a barren field. A rod of iron extends from it. People jeer from a large building bounded by a river nearby. Those holding on to the rod ignore the jeering from the building and partake of the tree’s sweet fruit, but there are some who heed the jeering and become ashamed even after eating the fruit, and are lost. This image is intimately familiar to so many Latter-day Saints as Lehi’s dream from 1 Nephi 8 in the Book of Mormon. It is, however, a relatively new image for me. I did not grow up with the image.

Leveling the Earth, Expanding the Circle

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. 

A Conversation Begins | Stephen H. Webb and Alonzo L. Gaskill, Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation

There has never been any official theological dialogue between the Roman Catholic and LDS Churches, but Stephen H. Webb and Alonzo L. Gaskill have opened an unofficial one in Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation.…

Peck’s Peak | Steven L. Peck, Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck; Steven L. Peck, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist

If someone ever asks me what kinds of things Steven Peck writes, the best answer I can give goes like this: the BYU biology professor and raconteur writes primarily in the fields of evolutionary biology, speculative theology, literary fiction, computer modeling, poetry, existential horror, satire, personal essay, tsetse fly reproduction, young-adult literature, human ecology, science fiction, religious allegory, environmentalism, and devotional narrative. You know, that kind of thing.

Finding Mormon Theology Again | Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity

Wrestling the Angel is the first volume in Terryl Givens’s latest project on the “foundations of Mormon thought and practice” (ix). The first of a two-volume work, this book deals with theology while the subsequent…

A Not-So-Innocent Abroad | Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary

Craig Harline’s mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary, is a hilarious, heart-of-gold account of the highs and lows of the author’s experiences in the Belgium Antwerp Mission in the early 1970s. The story proceeds chronologically through the events of Harline’s mission call and training period in the old LTM, his arrival in Belgium and subsequent travails with uninterested Belgians, and his eventual return home as a slightly-older and probably-a-bit-wiser young man.

Theology for a New Age | John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God

The Church of England, the heir of a nineteen hundred year Christian tradition, has fallen upon evil days. At least such is the assessment of The Reverend Nicholas Stacey, Rector of Woolwich, in a recent…

Free Agency and Freedom — Some Misconceptions

Free agency is a fundamental theological principle of the Mormon religion. Freedom is a basic goal of the American political system. But they are not the same thing, and Mormons damage both principles through a…

An Honorable Surrender: The Experience of Conversion

Not infrequently a Mormon convert thinks back on those events and feelings which preceded his decision to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He may wish to recall these things not so…

“Man” and the Telefinalist Trap

Far too often, I suspect, when people begin to talk about men, their talk wells up out of strong feelings and emotional views and such talk pricks us deeply if we have contrary views. After…

The Moral Dimensions of Man: A Scriptural View

Like beauty, the moral nature of man is in the eye of the beholder; there is no one description of that nature that will prove acceptable to everyone. The view presented in this article is…

A Mormon Concept of Man

I Mormonism has often been described as the most completely indigenous of all the religions originating in America. The Mormon movement has been called the typical American religious movement. Mormons do not object to these…

Boy Diving Through Moss

A boy with joy and fear inside
stood on the plank
above the pond.
He sensed the cold, dark water
underneath,
and, daring,

Mental Gas

Charles to his teacher—Sir, you say
That nature’s laws admit decay—
That changes never cease ; 
And yet you say, no void or space ;
‘Tis only change of shape or place—
No loss, and no increase. 

The Church in Latin American: Progress and Challenge

Non-Catholic religious groups have been increasing at a rapid rate in Latin America since World War II. For example, during the five-year period, 1952-57, the number of Protestants expanded from 2,866,000 to 4,534,000—a fifty-eight per…

A New Look at Repentance: The Gift of Repentance

Except for the preaching of evangelists—whether of a Billy Graham or of the small holiness sects—one hears little of repentance in this secular age, and this is also true among Latter-day Saints. It is not…

A New Look at Repentance: The Miracle of Forgiveness

In The Miracle of Forgiveness, Elder Spencer W. Kimball, acting president of the Council of Twelve, has written an often moving, spiritually refreshing, and highly readable book. In attempting this book-length examination of the principle…

A New Look at Repentance: Some Thoughts on Repentance

Good old Judea [New Zealand], where I became a man (if I ever did become one). At the age of seventeen, I was young indeed to have had the experiences I had there, but they…

A New Look at Repentance: Guilt: A Psychiatrist’s Viewpoint

President Stephen L Richards, concerned with some of the psychiatric problems which had come to the attention of the First Presidency, asked if I had time to drop over. In the minute required to walk…

A New Look at Repentance: Encounter

That night I was sustained as bishop many students came to offer their congratulations. One couple added, “Bishop, we’re engaged!” I had not yet learned to catch that hint which actually meant, “Keep your eye…

Wanted: Additional Outlets for Idealism

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. We grow old only by deserting our ideals. . . . You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your…

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

Responses and Perspectives: Lester Bush’s Historical Overview: Other Perspectives

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 62–72
Responding to Bush, Thomasson wrote in response to Lester Bush’s Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Review which that article caused him to reflect on what he believes and so it became to be very valuable for him personally.

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 11–68
Lester Bush’s landmark article tells the most comprehensive history of the church’s teachings on race and priesthood, destabilizing the idea that it originated with Joseph Smith or had been consistently taught.

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen

Dr. Clinton F. Larson has been acclaimed as a Mormon poet, even as the first Mormon poet. In his review of The Lord of Experience Professor John B. Harris seems to have represented many of…

Personal Conscience and Priesthood Authority

From the teachings of its founder, Joseph Smith, down to the present time, Mormon doctrine has recognized two complementary, though sometimes competing, sources of authority in personal affairs. Through one source, the priesthood hierarchy, Latter-day…

A Mighty Change of Heart

I was born in the Church and have always been active in it—more or less. My conviction in the validity of its claims has vacillated over the years. Until recently there always had been in…

LDS Approaches to the Holy Bible

Davis Bitton, writing in 1966, noted that “there is no reliable study of Mormon exegesis. .. . I can think of no single area of exploration which promises to be so fruitful in understanding the…

Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair

Few chapters in twentieth-century Mormon thought are more thought-pro voking than the events following B. H. Roberts’ efforts to publish what he considered his greatest work, that synthesis of science and religion, The Truth, the…

The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought

The Mormon belief that the individual spirit of man existed in the presence of God before the creation of the world is unique in modern Christianity. Mormons have rejected the Creator/creature dichotomy of Patristic theology…

The Adam-God Doctrine

On April 9, 1852, Brigham Young rose once again to address a session of general conference. He intended to preach several discourses, he said, and as the Deseret News observed the following week, “the Holy Ghost [rested] upon [him] in great power, while he revealed some of the precious things of the kingdom.”

“Moonbeams From a Larger Lunacy”: Poetry in the Reorganization

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 22–31
This study addresses poetry within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and defines an RLDS poet as someone who belongs to the RLDS church and who has published poetry in some form or other.

The New Mormon Poetry | Lewis Home, The seventh day

A new Mormon poetry is beginning to emerge from the shadow of traditional, more bardic Mormon verse. Peeping about in the bright sun, blinking a bit and rubbing its eyes, it shows itself in poems…

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

The Ward Teacher

On the first Sunday after my fourteenth birthday, I was given the responsibility to watch over the Church and see that all the members did their duty, and also to prevent iniquity, hardness with each…

God of Our Fathers

God gave David nightmares. The flame-eyed giant hurling thunderbolts from the mountain of heaven, hair and beard blown back by the storm of righteous wrath—it was he who haunted the boy. *** David knew his father…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Same Religion, Different Churches

If you want to learn how to have a successful interfaith marriage, I have to start by telling you as a social psychologist that I don’t recommend marrying outside your faith. Although I have been…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Two Faiths, Two Baptisms

I like the exotic ring to saying, “I married a Lutheran minister.” Heads turn. Conversations start. I like to think I rebelled against narrow parochial views, made a statement about cultural pluralism. I like to…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: From Here to Eternity?

My marriage in 1968 to a man who was not a member of the Church has been instrumental to my growth and development not only as a person but also as a Latter-day Saint. In…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: One View of Interfaith Marriage

Five years ago I would never have imagined that I would marry outside of the Church, let alone that I would discuss the experience in public. The number of people who will read this does not…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Eternity with a Dry-Land Mormon

I’ve heard them called both dry Mormons and dry-land Mormons. They are people who live intimately among the Mormons without becoming members of the Church. They are a puzzling lot because they often behave so…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Introductory Remarks

In any religion that stresses the importance of marriages between its members, choosing to marry someone of another faith is not a casual act. In fact, marrying outside the home faith is likely to incur…

Baptism for the Dead: Comparing RLDS and LDS Perspectives

Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 99–105
Underwood discusses why two religions who share the same exact upbringing have different opinions about the temple rituals.

The Concept of Grace in Christian Thought

The concept of grace and its relation to individual salvation is prob ably the most debated issue in the history of Christian thought. The list of combatants is virtually a Who’s Who in Christian thought:…

Heart of the Fathers

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…

A Teenager’s Mormon Battalion Journal | David L. Bigler, ed., The Gold Rush Diary of Azariah Smith

Since the publication of the Hosea Stout Journals in 1964, the University of Utah Press has made a significant contribution to the study of western history by publishing a number of important diaries, journals, and letter collections. The Gold…

A New Synthesis | Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830-1846

Exiles in a Land of Liberty is part of the University of North Carolina’s “Studies in Religion” series. The author, Kenneth H. Winn, is a relative newcomer to Mormon studies and, if this book is…

Mormonism’s First Theologian | The Essential Parley P. Pratt with foreword by Peter L. Crawley

At least one Latter-day Saint in the early days of the Church truly understood what it means to have the heavens open and God speak after centuries of silence. Par ley Parker Pratt, one of…

Utah’s Original “Mr. Republican” | Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics

I first encountered Reed Smoot more than two decades ago while researching the life and political career of Parley P. Christensen, a Utah political maverick who became the Farmer-Labor party nominee for president in 1920.…

A Poetic Legacy | Clarice Short, The Owl on the Aerial

If Clarice Short had not chosen to become a great educator, she might have developed into a major poet. Her poetic output, excellent in quality but admittedly limited, reveals her as a woman dedicated to her…

Clawson and the Mormon Experience | David S. Hoopes and Ray Hoopes, The Making of a Mormon Apostle: The Story of Rudger Clawson

In 1879 a young Mormon missionary named Rudger Clawson watched as an anti-Mormon mob in Georgia killed his companion. Through bluff and bravado Clawson survived the assault and brought his companion’s body back to church…

Delusion as an Exceedingly Fine Art | Franklin Fisher, Bones

About fifteen years ago, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher invited Franklin Fisher, a young and aesthetically bearded professor of English at the University of Utah, to read from his novel in progress at a gathering of the…

Two Covenant Systems | Rex Eugene Cooper, Promises Made to the Father: Mormon Covenant Organization

Historians of American religion often see a connection between Mormons and Puritans, if only because most early Saints came from New England. However, many studies which have mentioned similarities between these religions have done so…

A Song Worth Singing | Michael Hicks, Mormonism and Music: A History

Anyone who has worked with Mormon music has likely experienced the frustration of being unable to learn much about its past —such things as composers, per formers, and institutional policy and practice. Collections of folk…

Glimmers and Glitches in Zion

An eight-year-old Mormon can tell you a lot about Zion. At least I could. In response to Sister Jensen’s questions in Targeteer class, I’d raise my hand to give my rote answer: “Zion is a…

Becoming Mormon: The Elkton Branch, 1976-81

On the second Sunday of December 1976, Cloyd Mullins and his two sons, Lynne Whitney and her four children, Bill and Ellen Lilley and their two small children, a pair of missionaries, and Karl Tippets…

A Closer Focus: Challenges in Doing Local History

The sweep of wide-angle Mormon history is impressive, offering a comprehensive panorama of the Church’s worldwide workings, progress, and achievements. But to see Mormon history only through this wide-angle lens is to miss the rich…

AIDS: The Twentieth-Century Leprosy

Typically, when an individual contracts a disease, friends and relatives rally to provide needed support. Even terminal illnesses, though reminders of our own mortality, elicit comfort and sympathy. Friends and family form support groups, dispense…

Judaism and Mormonism: Paradigm and Supersession

For some time now, especially since World War II and the shock and guilt evoked in the Western world by the virtual extermination of the European Jews, traditional Christian views of the role of the…

Heavenly Father or Chairman of the Board?: How Organizational Metaphors Can Define and Confine Religious Experience

Many Latter-day Saints worry that as the Mormon Church has become more corporate in nature, it has not retained its strictly religious focus. Some have argued that its extensive financial holdings have made the Church…

On Spectral Evidence

October 3, 1992, the first day of the 162d semiannual LDS general conference, was the 300th anniversary of the action that finally stopped the Salem witch trials. Those trials, perhaps the greatest blot on American religious devotion, had resulted in the deaths of twenty people, all of whom vigorously proclaimed their innocence to the end. 

Dissent in the Church: Toward a Workable Definition

There are many in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who believe we need a workable definition of religious dissent in order to help make way for more serious debate over its legitimacy…

A Response to Paul Toscano’s “A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love Not Power”

When I first read Paul Toscano’s jeremiad I thought it was too harsh and angry. But on revisiting it three years later I say, “Yes!” to many of his points; for the ones I quibble…

A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love Not Power

One of the ironies of my life is that I decided in 1963 to leave the Catholic church as it was becoming more open to join the Mormon church as it was becoming more closed.…

Liberal Spirituality: A Personal Odyssey

“Liberal spirituality” is the title and theme of this essay. A double entendre is intended—suggesting the interdependence of a free and abundant spiritual life. My aim is to explore the nature and possibilities of liberal spirituality by reflecting on some of the key experiences and major ideas that have shaped my philosophy. I am concerned here with the essential values at the core of religious experience, a state of mind and an approach to life. The Mormon church has been but one of the anvils against which I have forged my identity. 

Dialogue Toward Forgiveness: A Supporting View

Mine is the interesting challenge to comment on “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology/’ The bill of particulars that Lavina Fielding Anderson has presented is comprehensive and disturbing, her recommendations are…

The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology

Dialogue 26.1 (Spring 1993): 23–82
The clash between obedience to ecclesiastical authority and the integrity of individual conscience is certainly not one upon which Mormonism has a monopoly. But the past two decades have seen accelerating tensions in the relationship between the institutional church and the two overlapping subcommunities I claim—intellectuals and feminists.

Faith, Hope, and Charity

It seems to me that the whole difficulty of our friendship was reflected in our names. It wasn’t that we had feuding surnames—certainly no Capulets and Montagues—but in fact the conflict was more fundamental because…

Easter Service

“The earth turns, the sun rises. It’s quite simple.”  We turned towards the high peaks to the east—cold, and still smooth and clean with snow, the half-circle of rising sun warming our faces. I squinted…

Epiphany

We had been up there for two months when the clouds came in. It hap pened overnight. When I crawled into my sleeping bag the night before, the air was dry and clear. The mountain…

The Unexpected Choice

“Mrs. Greer, you must abort your baby.” The words wrapped me in horror. They offered a solution worse than the problem could ever be. I had cancer, now I was pregnant, and Dr. Krueger wanted…

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

Any discussion of Mormon culture or doctrine in the work of nationally prominent American poet May Swenson must begin with the caveat that Swenson, for virtually all of her adult life, was not a believing…

W.H. Chamberlin and the Quest for a Mormon Theology

[1]It is time to resurrect W. H. Chamberlin. Chamberlin lived the life of an intellectual and spiritual pilgrim. With little money he filled a mission to the Society Islands and later served as mission president…

Zion-building: Pondering a Paradigm | James W. Lucas and Warner P. Woodworth, Working Toward Zion: Principles of the United Order for the Modern World

Zion-building as the formation of social institutions based on principles purportedly underlying Mormon United Orders has repeatedly captured the attention of scholars, re formers, practitioners, and church leaders over the past 150 years. The variety…

The Celestial Kingdom

Julie was asked to be baptized for the dead. Her teacher, Mrs. Dixon, had read down the roll, asking the girls in alphabetical order. She had moved into Julie’s neighborhood, just up the street in…

Luke 7:37

The alpha and omega sat at meat. 
The woman could not speak. She only knelt 
And wept. Translucent tears upon his feet 
Flowed like river waters to the Delta. 

Give Me That Old Time Testimony Meeting

Maybe it is just sentimental musing, but I think that I remember a time when things were, well, messy. I remember testimony meetings where the eccentric ramblings of older members consumed large chunks of time,…

Hosannah

“I looked it up last night.” Elaine stopped conducting our choir practice to ask if we knew what Hosannah meant.  It was dark out, almost 10:00 p.m., and the canyon winds blew cold for October…

Stealing the Reaper’s Grim: The Challenge of Dying Well

I first encountered death at age three when my infant brother, after only one day of life, succumbed to respiratory failure. I have few memories of the viewing, but do recall the delicate blue veins on the side of his infant scalp. There was great sorrow in the chapel. But, as the years passed, his death became an abstraction. Now, over three decades later, after witnessing a fair amount of human suffering and death, both through personal experiences and my professional role, the process of dying is no longer an abstraction to me. I have, in fact, become a reluctant authority. 

An Expanded Definition of Priesthood? Some Present and Future Consequences

Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 319–325
But the fact that we must look at organizational dynamics before we can begin to understand the issues that would be raised by expanding priesthood to include women is an apt commentary on the complex and sometimes confused role that priesthood authority has come to play in the modern church.

Women and Priesthood

I smiled wryly at the cartoon on the stationery. The picture showed a woman standing before an all-male ecclesiastical board and asking, “Are you trying to tell me that God is not an equal opportunity…

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

There once was a time, albeit brief, when a “Negro problem” did not exist for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During those early months in New York and Ohio no mention was even made of Church attitudes towards blacks. The Gospel was for “all nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples,” and no exceptions were made. A Negro, “Black Pete,” was among the first converts in Ohio, and his story was prominently reported in the local press. W. W. Phelps opened a mission to Missouri in July, 1831, and preached to “all the families of the earth,” specifically mentioning Negroes among his first audience. The following year another black, Elijah Abel, was baptized in Mary land.

Seers, Savants and Evolution: The Uncomfortable Interface

Ever since his great synthesis, Darwin’s name has been a source of discomfort to the religious world. Too sweeping to be fully fathomed, too revolutionary to be easily accepted, but too well documented to be…

The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young

The brethren testify that brother Brigham Young is brother Joseph’s legal successor. You never heard me say so. I say that I am a good hand to keep the dogs and wolves out of the…

Nauvoo Roots of Mormon Polygamy, 1841-46: A Preliminary Demographic Report

Polygamy, marriage to more than one spouse at a time, cannot be seen in the fossil record of our primitive ancestor, Homo erectus, and no one knows if Lucy of the African Rift, reputed to…

The Development of the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony

Dialogue 34.1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 87

However, the temple has maintained its central role in the lives of
Latter-day Saints by being able to create a point of intersection between
human desires for righteousness and the divine willingness to be bound
by covenant. This point has remained constant, even though emphases
in the church have changed over time, also bringing change to the en￾dowment ceremony itself

Selling the Chevrolet: A Moral Exercise (vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 1983)

This is the saddest story I have ever told. Not because The Chevrolet is gone, but because it probably is not. 

This much is known. During the Christmas season of 1973, Gene and Charlotte England traveled to Salt Lake City from Northfield, Minnesota. They made the trip in The Chevrolet—a brown stationwagon of uncertain origin.

Two Trains and a Dream

I. October 8, 1908: A Train

Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading 
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet, 
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit 
to Boston, with his traveling companion.

The Weeping God of Mormonism

[1]In the book of Moses, revealed to Joseph Smith in 1830 as part of his re vision of the Bible, we learn of a prophet named Enoch, who is called to preach repentance to his…

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass 
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force, 
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails. 

On Fidelity, Polygamy, and Celestial Marriage (vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 1987)

This is an essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea—the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy—that has important religious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and…

Blessing the Chevrolet (vol. 9, no. 3, Fall 1975)

At various times I have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t until I found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my Chevrolet that I really felt what that experience meant to those early Saints, who depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things. 

Eugene England: Our Brother in Christ

Brigham Young said there never was a time when he did not know Joseph Smith. What Brigham meant, I believe, is that when he first met Joseph Smith there was such a deep and immediate…

A Dining Room Table

If the tapestry that is my intellectual and spiritual life, Eugene Eng land’s influence not only figures as a prominent color, but helps to shape the pattern of the weave itself. Many of the moments…

A Brief Tour of England: My Year with Gene

We in Utah Valley State College’s Center for the Study of Ethics were sardines, but we were happy sardines. Our office (formerly a mythical beast called a “faculty lounge”) housed the chair of the humanities…

Blood Sports

This is how I see it. I find it to be a dark side of Mormonism, pervasive and insidious in character. Young men, in some cases young women, are socialized into blood sports. Youth in…

Song of Shiblon

I am twenty-one years old.

I lie in the golden light of a Korean September afternoon. I have curled myself up on the musty, avocado-skinned sofa that occupies a large corner of the living room. A small living room in a small apartment, which occupies the floor above a cosmetics store that seems to sell only furniture.

Last Supper

“Have you heard the really bad news?” my editor, Doc, asked almost off handedly as he wound the film in his camera. 

Then came that pause.

God, Man, and Satan in The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Brady Udall has given the same sort of message to readers of his fiction. In an interview with the journal Irreantum, Udall said, “I don’t want to teach readers a lesson of any kind. I simply want them to have a hair raising, heart-thumping, mind-numbing, soul-tearing experience.”

Without Mercy? Neil LaBute as Mormon Artist: A consideration of Your Friends and Neighbors, Bash, The Mercy Seat, and The Shape of Things

Philip Roth once noted that American writers were divided into two camps: “palefaces,” followers of the refined genteel tradition of Henry James and William Dean Howells with their elevated sensibilities and decorous language, and “redskins”…

Righteousness Express: Riding the PG&R

A new litmus test of righteousness has swept the church: the shunning of all R rated and the de facto acceptance of all PG and PG-13 movies. I don’t like litmus tests. They are too…

Alive in Mormon Poetry

The summer 2002 edition of Irreanteum: Exploring Mormon Literature is de voted to the theme of environmental writing in LDS theology and culture. It features poems solicited by guest editor Todd Petersen by several contemporary…

Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture

When the above notice appeared in the Improvement Era in September 1933, it did not seem out of place in a publication intended for the general church membership. In the same issue of the Improvement Era, Theodore E. Curtis posted a notice for another collection of poetry. Its announcement included endorsements from notable leaders of the church: 

Editor’s Introduction: Wicks, Modems, and the Winds of War

Standing as we still do on the brink of a new millennium, Latter-day Saints share with their neighbors and friends across the globe a profound interest in the fortunes of twenty-first-century war and peace. Not only do we wish to live our lives and raise our children under a quiet sky in safety and peace, far from the addictive savagery to which humankind sinks in time of war, but as an increasingly international church committed to sending missionaries into all the countries of the world, who could dispute the advantages if all those countries were at peace?

A Tribute for Service Well Rendered

The Bishop in Neal Chandler’s story “The Call” counsels a young man: “It’s not easy to be a real writer. . . .” How true, especially when you want, as did the bishop in Neal’s…

A Motherless Son Sings the Blues | Paul Swenson, Iced at the Ward, Burned at the Stake

Last spring I wrote an essay for the March 2004 AML symposium in which I argued that the most effective poets writing from the LDS culture are those who provide a counterweight to the main…

Not a Coveyesque Self-Help Book | Ronald W. Walker, Qualities That Count: Heber J. Grant as Businessman, Missionary, and Apostle

Collections of scholarly articles often display their strengths in their parts rather than in their functioning as a unified whole. After all, the structure of such volumes invites readers to pick and choose and, if…

The Province of the Extreme | Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Krakauer’s success has come as a writer of narrative nonfiction. He is best known for Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (New York: Villard,1997). In Under the Banner of Heaven:…

Salvation

3 She held the umbrella close to her head, limiting her vision to the circle of stones at her feet. Anna watched her companion’s hemline bounce in time to the click of her heels against…

At Bay

There are no waves on the bay side of the peninsula. The tide simply licks up and back, up and back on the sand shore. Beyond the shore, tall sailboats of vivid blues, greens, and…

An Interview with David Sjodahl King

David S. King has led a life exceptional for its combination of public and ecclesiastical service. His parents were Vera Sjodahl King (1891-1955) and William Henry King (1862-1949), a four-term U.S. Senator from Utah. Born…

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

When I read Robert Hughes’s essay, “Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture,” published in a recent Dialogue,[1] I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to respond. But like a sliver that goes at first unnoticed and later…

Without Number

And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. . . . And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. Moses…

Roses

The evening before Jim Wilson’s family moved, he and Bob Olding rode their bikes down to the Provo River to swim one more time. The last five boys were just leaving the hole, so Bob…

Like the Lilies of the Field

I float in the corner of the university diving pool. My legs, which are more muscular and dense than my torso, pull me down. Closing my eyes, I’m rocked by the wake from a diver. Sound disappears with my ears under water. I arch my belly and lift my heavy legs higher. My body is buoyed up in a manner that feels like faith. 

poetry on the ‘fridge door

my mother is madly licking 
at the languid red peach, 
screaming at life and 
the rust crush of death. 

The 1948 Secret Marriage of Louis J. Barlow: Origins of FLDS Placement Marriage

Dialogue 40.1 (Spring 2007): 83–136
Watson explains how the secret marriage of Louis J. Barlow to a 15-year-old girl caused a major rift among fundamentalists. Today’s fundamentalist members are still experiencing the effects of that marriage.

Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy

With the Utah War’s sesquicentennial commemoration now underway, it is appropriate to reexamine that campaign’s origins, conduct, significance, and historiography. This article’s purpose is to stimulate such probing. I hope to do so through the story of my own research and conclusions about the war over the past half-century—one-third of the period since President James Buchanan and Governor Brigham Young came into armed conflict during 1857-58.

The Theology of Desire

A friend who is a soprano once related a story to me of a rime when she was accompanied by a male pianist. They worked together on the piece for some weeks; and finally, when they performed, the ecstatic release, the sense of the flowing together of their spirits, was, in her words, “like making love.” 

Brattle Street Elegy: Holding a Master Key

Heresy, I know, but . . . it was a quirky old building that didn’t work very well. While I would never have chosen to tear it down, after the fire the only architectural feature…

Brattle Street Elegy: Treasures

I started attending the chapel at 4 Longfellow Park in 1969 when I was a freshman at Wellesley College. It was my introduction to Mormon life, since I had joined the Church in Illinois at…

Brattle Street Elegy: Anchored with Meaning

This church building has heard so many songs and souls. It has witnessed so much painful and redemptive spiritual journeying. Freud and Darwin were welcomed right along with the Three Witnesses. In the chapel I…

Brattle Street Elegy: My Personal Brand of Weirdness

In 1967 when I was eight years old, my family moved from Salt Lake to Cambridge. The building on Longfellow Park quickly became a symbol for what I had brought with me from Utah: a…

Brattle Street Elegy: Especially the Friends

So many memories! It would take a book to record them all.

I was there from 1976 to 1983 and returned many times, including a three-and-a-half month visit in 1997.

Brattle Street Elegy: Homeless Memories

The Longfellow Park building was as quirky and original as its congregants. I hope the church will use this fire as an opportunity to build a more orthodox, rectangular, “Mormon” building in Cambridge and hopefully…

Brattle Street Elegy: Spiritually Housed

I’m presently a member of the Longfellow Park First Ward and have been here since 2006. I know it’s just a building, but the Longfellow Park Chapel was one of the reasons I knew Boston…

Brattle Street Elegy: So Glad, So Sad . . .

I was baptized in that church. I was a member of the University and Longfellow Park I wards. This is such sad news. I am glad to hear everyone is okay. I am sad to…

Brattle Street Elegy: Wonderful Small Things

My mother sent me the link to this blog site and she has posted here as well. Linda Hoffman Kimball and Chris Kimball met in the Longfellow Park building that fell yesterday. I am the…

Brattle Street Elegy: Falling in Immediate Love

I first visited Longfellow Park in 1994 when I was investigating colleges, and I immediately fell in love . . . in love with the architectural symbolism of the building, like the tiered, round window…

Brattle Street Elegy: Always Sacred

I first arrived in late August 1990. Two weeks earlier, I had undergone a conversion experience that had jolted me from world weary agnosticism to a fervent belief in God and the Restoration. Simultaneously I…

Brattle Street Elegy: We Should Do A Study

It is a great pleasure for me to be here with all of you Cambridge veterans and to be asked to represent the huge cohort of LDS women who have sat in these pews—those who have preceded me and those who have come after me. What an opportunity this has been to recall some of my happiest and most vivid memories. What happened to me here? Just about everything important that has happened in my long and eventful life. 

Hermeneutic Adventures in Home Teaching: Mary and Richard Rorty

When philosopher Alastair MacIntyre came striding into my Vanderbilt University office brandishing the New York Times in October of 1985, I knew something was up. “Congratulations,” he said, “your church has just entered its Renaissance period.” I was used to seeing him walk into Furman Hall on Ash Wednesdays with a gray streak on his forehead, and we had talked about Mormonism, but I had no clue what he was talking about. He showed me the front page of the paper. It was the Mark Hofmann bombings—murders to cover up Hofmann’s forgeries. “It only took you 150 years,” Alastair noted. “It took us a millennium and a half.” 

Divine Darwinism, Comprehensible Christianity, and the Atheist’s Wager: Richard Rorty on Mormonism—an Interview with Mary V. Rorty and Patricia Rorty

Cranney: Richard mentions in Philosophy and Social Hope the dangers of fundamentalist religions and the extent of their political influence. Where did Mormonism fit on the fundamentalist continuum? 

Mary Rorty: That’s a very interesting question because that’s something that has changed a great deal in my lifetime. The thought that Mormonism now considers itself in part an ally of the Evangelical Protestant movement is a surprise to many people, and that’s certainly not the side of Mormonism to which Richard had been exposed. 

Cranney: Were there any specific instances . . . Of course, he died before Proposition 8 in California.

Hidden Treasures

Shortly after my family and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, three years ago, my six-year-old son invited a neighbor boy over to play. The neighbor asked if they could go geode hunting in the wooded creek behind our house. I did not know what geodes were or what kind of artillery might be required to hunt them, but I sent the boys out with my blessing, hoping they could not get into too much trouble. A little while later, I saw them staggering out of the woods, splattered with mud and clay. They were carrying a heavy rounded rock, which they dumped unceremoniously on the porch. 

Too Long Ignored | Ronald G. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe for Zion

Although George Darling Watt (1812–81) is perhaps best known in the LDS Church as the first convert in the British Isles, he also recorded Brigham Young’s sermons in shorthand for more than sixteen years, preserving…

Characters to Care About | Jonathan Langford, No Going Back

Google “gay” and “Mormon” these days, and you’ll be flung— headfirst—into a veritable deluge of vitriol and sanctimony. Of course, it didn’t start with California’s Proposition 8. No, that river’s path pushes back, through the…

Re-Creating the Bible | William C. Bishop, B. G. Christensen, Samantha Larsen Hastings, Sarah Jenkins, Eric W. Jepson, Ryan McIlvain, Danny Nelson, and Arwen Taylor, The Fob Bible

Lately the Bible has been getting a bum rap. Christopher Hitchens calls it “a nightmare”and blames it for much of humanity’s suffering—everything from sexism to genocide. At the same time, literalist approaches to the Bible have produced narrow theology and tendentious, unscientific speculation.

The Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered | Beverley Clack and Brian R. Clack, The Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Introduction

This introduction to the philosophy of religion, originally published in 1998, is fully revised and updated in the 2008 edition. The authors, Beverly Clack and Brian R. Clack are, respectively, reader in theology, philosophy and…

El Problema del Dolor/The Problem of Pain

Buenos días, hermanos y hermanas. Para los que no me conocen, me llamo Cristian Anderson. Nací en el Lago Salado, Utah, y viví allí hasta los 18 años cuando fui a San Francisco para estudiar biología. Después de un año de estudios salí de misión a Houston Sur en el estado de Texas. Al regresar a la universidad conocí a mi esposa, Marina Capella. Ella nació en Los Ángeles y pasó la mayor parte de su vida en un suburbio que se llama Fontana, hasta que salió a estudiar en la misma universidad que yo. Nos conocimos en octubre y nos casamos en septiembre del siguiente año en el Templo de San Diego, hace 7 años. Todavía somos estudiantes, pero en menos de dos meses Marina recibirá su doctorado de médica pediatra y vamos a mudarnos a Boston, al otro lado del país donde ella estudiará medicina en Harvard y yo trabajaré en el Museo de Historia Natural. 

In Lieu of History: Mormon Monuments and the Shaping of Memory

As a missionary in France and Belgium, I frequently encountered devout Catholics who would describe their journeys to Lourdes or Fatima. “Ah, oui! J’ai vu la grotte, la grotte où la Vierge s’est apparue à Bernadette! J’étais lá!” While these humble women, dressed in robin-egg-blue housecoats, could not bring home a piece of the cross, they could show me their holy water, rosary beads, or skinned knees, emblems of their devotion and commitment. Their pilgrimage was no trite tourist trip. They didn’t watch the spectacle with ironic detachment, rolling their eyes at the commodification of sacred space. Non! They walked on holy ground. I nodded and smiled. But I confess that the stories amused me. Holy water indeed. 

Wives and Other Women: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon

John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon were the three eldest sons of George Q. Cannon, the man viewed by historians as second only to Brigham Young in prominence in late nineteenth-century Mormon Utah. George Q. Cannon was a man of unusual talents and skills, whose far-flung influence extended to ecclesiastical, political, literary, journalistic, and business matters in Utah and the West, and each of the three sons inherited much of their father’s brilliance, culture, and charisma.

Joseph Smith’s Letter from Liberty Jail as an Epistolary Rhetoric

Joseph Smith may not have ever spoken the word “rhetoric,” but his participation in juvenile debating societies probably brought him some contact with rhetoric’s long tradition.Regardless of his knowledge of this tradition, it is obvious that Smith knew how to persuade people through speech and writing. In addition, his writings instruct readers about how to persuade in a manner consistent with the restored gospel of Mormonism.

The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr

Dialogue 43.4 (Winter 2010): 1–42
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a robust methodology that eliminates the guesswork in determining winding locations by visual inspection of crease marks or lacunae features, and to determine whether the missing interior section of the Hôr scroll could have been long enough to accommodate the Book of Abraham. Fortunately, this is a question that can be definitively answered by examining the physical characteristics of the extant portions of the scroll. The haste and greed of Michael Chandler provide the key to unlocking this mystery.

A Sacrament of Stewardship

Carrol and Edwin Firmage contributed papers to the fall issue that review Mormon history during the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries and scriptural precedent, in an attempt to motivate a Mormon audience toward improved ecological fidelity: Edwin Firmage Jr., “Light in Darkness: Embracing the Opportunity of Climate Change” and Carrol Firmage, “Preserves” (43, no. 3 [Fall 2010]: 100–127 and 128–65). 

“Take No Thought”

You’re going to miss it. You’re distracted. Sit up straight. You’re not paying attention. 

God does not come and go—your attention does. 

All sins are just variations on that same desire to do something else when you’re already doing something. Multitaskers are children of the devil. You can’t serve two masters. Divided attention is just dressed-up inattention.

Immortal for Quite Some Time (an excerpt)

I’m Lila, a heat-drugged woman announces, edging her weight out of an overstuffed room into the hall. How can I help you? I explain we are his family. She says she is sorry. He seemed like such a nice man. 

The Discursive Construct of Virtual Angels, Temples, and Religious Worship: Mormon Theology and Culture in Second Life

Cyberspace is changing the way religion is practiced in contemporary society. A 2004 Pew Internet and American Life project estimated that 64 percent of American internet users go online for spiritual or religious purposes.Religious organizations large and small are increasingly participating in cyberspace; and according to Peter Horsfield, the influence of digital media is producing major consequences for religious institutions and ideologies. 

Mormon and Queer at the Crossroads

Dialogue 44.1 (Spring 2011): 53–84
This essay explores conflicting messages within LDS teaching on LGBT rights, when it both opposed same-sex marriage and in the wake of Prop 8 also came out in support of other LGBT rights that display both wrath and mercy. It explores a theory of LDS teachings on homosexuality along these lines, as well as the context of shifting norms around sexual identity.

The Early Mormon Chain of Belonging

On March 10, 1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith preached a sermon after the burial of his friend King Follett, killed by accidental rock-fall while building a well. To an assembled crowd of his followers, Smith proclaimed, “If you have power to seal on earth & in heaven then we should be crafty. . . . Go & seal on earth your sons & daughters unto yourself & yourself unto your fathers in eternal glory . . . use a little Craftiness & seal all you can & when you get to heaven tell your father that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven. I will walk through the gate of heaven and Claim what I seal & those that follow me & my Council.” 

Scry Me a River | George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

Terry Tempest Williams saved my life. As a BYU undergraduate suffering from late winter doldrums back in 1993, I heard her claim that you don’t really know your own place if you don’t know the local birds. She had no idea, but she had just slapped defibrillator paddles on my heart. I was a long-time birder but hadn’t been birding for months.

Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder | William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858

In this first volume of a planned two-volume documentary history of the Utah War, editor William P. MacKinnon has assembled a treasure house of previously unexploited documents to illuminate the decisions, actions, and bungling on…

Image and Reality in the Utah Zion | Polly Aird, Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861

Just as national histories are always written by the victors, religious narratives are often written by those who remain within the fold. The common tropes of conversion, devotion, dedication through trials, and faithfulness until death…

To Bless and Sanctify: Three Meditations on the Sacrament

Kris Wright, Baking a Sacrament Prayer
Matthew Bowman, This Is My Body: A Mormon Sacrament
Kristine Haglund, Holy, Holy, Holy

On Vital Questions | Robert L. Millet, ed., By What Authority? The Vital Question of Religious Authority in Christianity

Opening his short contribution to this collection of essays, Roger Olson, professor of theology at Baylor University, writes: “One can hardly do justice to the subject of religious authority in a brief reflection essay” (180).…

Harrell’s Mettle | Jack Harrell, A Sense of Order and Other Stories

How do you read a collection of short stories by one author? Do you curl up with the book the same way you would with a novel, reading one story after another until your leg falls asleep or your stomach growls for food or the phone rings? Do you read one story, then close the book to think about it, perhaps reopening the book to reread parts or the whole? Do you expect the stories to be connected by characters or theme or tone and therefore search for universal elements? Do you come to each story afresh, hungry for wonder and new insights? 

Pomp, Circumstance, and Controversy | Richard E. Bennett, Susan Easton Black, and Donald Q. Cannon, The Nauvoo Legion in Illinois: A History of the Mormon Militia, 1841–1846

From its gorgeous dust jacket to its prosaic index, this valuable book provides narrative history, data compilations, and unexploited documents shedding light on one of the most unusual, controversial organizations of antebellum American military his tory, the short-lived Nauvoo Legion of Hancock County, Illinois. In the process, the authors add to our understanding of the violent forces that led to the 1844 assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith as well as the subsequent westbound Mormon exodus from Nauvoo, then one of the largest cities in Illinois.

Immortal for Quite Some Time, Part 2

(after the autopsy, after the funeral, after AIDS)

I’ve started to read John’s missionary letters from Italy. Nearly one a week for two years. From what Mom told me when I asked about them, I expected requests for money, reports of trouble, and depressed silences. John communicated all of that, of course; but his letters are profoundly uplifting as well (or is it fraternal nostalgia I’m feeling?).

“Wholesome, Hallowed, and Gracious”: Confronting the Winter’s Night

In northern Europe, where our celebration of the Christmas season has its roots, the winter nights are long, dark, and foreboding and, at least in myth, teeming with unwelcome mysteries. It was against this backdrop that the early Christian monks and missionaries transformed the pagan Yuletide festivals into our modern Christmas celebration. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the physical and spiritual darkness of winter seemed, for many, to be lifted at the Christmas season. 

Inside the “Loyal Opposition” | Philip Lindholm, ed., Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority

Few books convey the pain and poignancy of Mormon ecclesiastical discipline as compellingly as Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority, a newly published paperback from Greg Kofford Books. The volume is the product of editor Philip Lindholm’s conversations with several prominent Mormons whose writings and speeches have provoked the ire of the LDS Church. While these dissidents’ recollections and reflections take center stage in Latter-day Dissent, Lindholm uses their stories to advance a reinterpretation of Mormon intellectual history.

Can Mormonism Have a Systematic Theology? | Charles Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology

This is a wide-ranging and detailed book, consisting of an extensive examination of a wide variety of topics in Mormon theology from the time of scripture to the present. Harrell announces his methodology in the…

Canon: Open, Closed, Evolving | David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America

Sacred Borders represents a rigorous and compelling consideration of various traditions about the state of the biblical canon in American religion. For bookish Latter-day Saints, this volume will provide much-needed context for early Mormon beliefs about their open canon as well as a subtle and sympathetic view of both sides of the debate over the closed canon.

Scaling Never

There are so many kinds of never. There’s the never that Jacob’s Mum uses when she says, “Never talk to strangers; it’s dangerous,” and there’s the never his Dad uses when he says, “Never play…

from “A Paris Journal”

July 5, 2009. What an idea, a Sunday outdoor market in Paris featuring not antiques, imported fruit, or cast-off clothing, but birds. As good a way as any to worship, so we take a quick…

Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures

Let me start with an explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide phenomenon with a presence in more than 150 countries, and more members and more growth outside the United States than within it. 

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology

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. 

On “Praying with Your Feet”

I’m grateful for this invitation to speak to your quorum.

My objective today is to tell you about my faith journey and offer up some observations and possible conclusions. I’m going to speak the only way I know how: honestly and with complete candor. It means making myself vulnerable in front of group I don’t know well (yet), but we think you have a right to know your new stake presidency. If you sustain us as your leaders, then it seems you have a right to know exactly what it is you are sustaining.

Faith and Doubt in the First-Person Singular | Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel; Robert Rees, ed., Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons; and Thomas Riskas, Deconstructing Mormonism:An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith

In 1979, Mary Bradford published in these pages an important personal essay on personal essays. Titled “I, Eye, Aye,” the piece first outlines a brief history of the genre within Mormon letters and then offers its…

God as Engineer | A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman, eds., Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision

Albert Einstein famously wrote: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.” Einstein did not believe in a personal God, of course, but A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman do, and ask the same questions in their book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision. Written from the point of view of faithful LDS scientists and engineers, Bushman and Howe (an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab) attempt to tackle a question that has long fascinated me: what can we learn if we analyze God’s creations as the master work of the master Engineer?

Personal Revelation Narratives: An Interview with Tom Mould

Shawn Tucker conducted this interview with Tom Mould in April, 2013, in Elon, North Carolina. In 2011, Utah State University Press published Tom’s book Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition. Shawn is Tom’s colleague at Elon University, and Tom interviewed Shawn as part of his field work. A brief excerpt of the book follows the interview (reprinted with the kind permission of the Utah State University Press). 

America and the One True Church: What My Church Taught Me about My Country

Precious few Americans outside the South know much about my church—the Church of Christ—and that’s a shame, since it illumines so well the character of the American nation. Because my church is relatively small (c.…

“Questions at the Veil”

In the months after September 11, 2001, essayist and poet Frederick Turner crafted an unpublished tale entitled “The Terrorist Goes to Paradise.” 

Told in the first person by the terrorist himself, the story recounts the glories and privileges that greet an operative who helped fly a jet into New York’s towering World Trade Center. Upon his arrival in heaven the terrorist discovers to his pleasure that, for his heroism, as he presumes, Allah has provided him with all his fantasies and more: movement without restriction, un encumbered by time; scenes of beauty surpassing mortal ability to express; seventy-two voluptuous virgins enacting without restraint his every whim; infinite, incomparable food without satiation; a ministering angel attending to his every request and answering every query. It is all . . . heavenly.

Matter Made Graciously Present | Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

Once philosophy was not even taught at BYU for fear of corrupting the youth and Mormonism has had a famously rocky relationship with theology. But as with Mormon Studies in general, we are in the…

The Gift of Tongues

Dead. The rose bushes, the dogwood, the spirea, and the green spreading yews, all dead: the entire hillside, a dusty memorial to her beautiful yard. The dry leaves crumbled between Mary’s fingers and fell into…

An Interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner

Rabbi Harold Kushner is the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, along with numerous other books addressing the relationship between religion and lived adversity. He served as the congregational rabbi at the Temple Israel of Natick for over twenty-five years. Gregory A. Prince cofounded Virion Systems, Inc., a biotech company dedicated to the prevention and treatment of pediatric diseases. He is the author of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism as well as several other books on the history of the priesthood.

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Two poems that I read during my sophomore year of college ended up changing my life. The first of these, John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” changed it quickly by helping me decide to change my major from accounting to English. It wasn’t so much that I was impressed with Keats for being such a good writer as much as I was impressed with myself for being such a good reader and for sort of understanding “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It made me feel smart, perhaps for the first time in my life, and I decided that I liked feeling smart and wanted to spend the rest of my time in college understanding poems and feeling like a genius. So I majored in English. In fact, I majored in English three times. As a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and, eventually, as a professor of English literature I continued to teach “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in a variety of courses more or less the same way that I originally understood it the first time I read it. 

Deep Cheer

Nine years ago, my husband Kyle was offered an attractive job at Tulane University in New Orleans. At the same time, he was offered—and ultimately accepted—a position at Indiana University. Six months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and Tulane shut down for an extended period. If Kyle had accepted that job, we likely would have been displaced indefinitely from home and work and schools. We felt empathy for those who suffered, and we thanked our lucky stars that we had dodged this bullet.

Divertissement

His death being end-stopped 
never justifies 
the enjambment 
of my survival 
that goes on and on, 

Bo Knows Heaven

So there’s my sort-of-neighbor big Bo, who despite owning two rock-solid Scandinavian names including, yes, Bo, doesn’t exactly seem to have things rock-solidly together.

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Over ten years ago, blogs changed the look, feel, and immediacy of Mormon discourse almost overnight. The ongoing lively conversations, brilliantly constructed posts, and sometimes even unruly debates have not stopped since. Dialogue both views and participates in this online dialogue, submitting archival references to current discussions and writing pieces in concert with the printed prose found within its present-day pages.

What Shall We Do with Thou? Modern Mormonism’s Unruly Usage of Archaic English Pronouns

What shall we do with thou? If this question grates on your ear, it may be because you recognize that thou is a nominative pronoun (a subject) and therefore never follows a preposition. If it doesn’t grate, then you are living, breathing evidence of the difficulties presented by archaic second-person pronouns in twenty-first-century Mormonism.

Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Quest for Respectability

Almost two decades have elapsed since I published The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). My book began by acknowledging and illustrating the “Americanization” thesis advanced by others— namely that the LDS Church and religion had spent the first half of the twentieth century in a deliberate policy of assimilation with American society and was thus following the time-honored trajectory traced by such early scholars as Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber—from a peculiar and disreputable sect toward a respectable church, increasingly comfortable with the surrounding American culture.

For All His Creations of Which I’m a Part: Buddha Nature, Neo-Animism, and Postmodern Mormonism

When my parents died, I inherited our family’s Buddhist altar, or butsudan. It now sits in my living room in Lexington, Massachusetts. I pray before it about twice a month. I burn a stick of incense and ring a small brass bell. I close my eyes, and thank my ancestors for what they have given me. Usually, I do this with my youngest son, Kan, who is now three years old.

Charity on the Rocks

My husband grew up backpacking, and it was one of the conditions of our marriage that I would learn to backpack too. I do it now, and occasionally even enjoy it, but it’s definitely a stretch to say that I’m good at it or love it as wholeheartedly as Mike does; backpacking is perpetually a challenge for me, and my favorite part is the end of the day when I collapse in our tent with my Kindle. I say this by way of prefacing a personal story so that you understand the context as I start telling you about a time when nature nearly got the best of me. 

Of Cups and Councils

My mother died recently from complications of Alzheimer’s. Because four of my siblings live near my parents and were helping my dad with arrangements, my sister Carol and I decided to fly on Sunday for the Tuesday morning service and then stay longer after the funeral. We arrived at my dad’s apartment Sunday afternoon, anticipating some quiet hours of reminiscing or just relaxing. 

Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes | David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics; Richard Davis, The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics; and Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

The term “liberalism” with all its rhetorical permutations—self-identifying as a “liberal,” defending principles of “liberty,” showing “liberality” in one’s interactions with others, etc.—is a contested concept in America. It’s both an adjective and a noun.…

What Kind of Monster

What kind of monster spits a wad of gum in a urinal?
Blue. Brain-folded.  
Pregnant with identifying evidence. 
DNA. Marks from teeth  

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

It is early evening in ancient Jerusalem, and a beautiful young Jewish woman, recently wed, carries a small bundle of clean clothing and a linen towel. Her sandals pad against the limestone pathway that borders the synagogue. She is on her way to the community mikvah, a font-like, open-air, recessed pool designed for ritual bathing, where a few other women may or may not already be waiting their turn. This is a devotion the women of her faith observe once a month, seven days after their menstrual cycle ends, in order to be “purified from [their] uncleanness,” to use the words from 2 Samuel, chapter 11. While the mikvah is enclosed for the privacy and protection of the women, it’s still possible for someone with a particular vantage point—say, someone on the roof of the king’s palace, perhaps—to illicitly watch a woman complete her ritual, to watch her disrobe and completely immerse herself in the sanctified waters of the mikvah before she emerges to dress herself in fresh clothing. Thus, according to her obedience to the law, the young wife Bathsheba is restored to purity. 

The Struggle for Female Authority in Biblical and Mormon Tradition

Dialogue 48.2 (Summer 2015): 1–57
Although race and gender are connected in 2 Nephi 26:33, the historical origins of the gender ban have not yet been addressed with the same degree of attention in Church discourse.

Adam Had an Eden

in mankind is the end of kind 
in woman the beginning of woe 

By the Mouth of Two or Three

If the world were truly and wholly sullen, 
the starlings would never sing—never. 

They would see only blood in the clouds 
of sunrise and sunset and hold their peace

Living and Dying in the Realm of Forgetful People

God once asked a murderer about the location of his victim. The murderer evaded the question by posing another: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“After the Body of My Spirit”: Embodiment, Empathy, and Mormon Aesthetics

Nearly thirty-five years ago, Merrill Bradshaw wrote: “It seems almost unbelievable that after all these years of the development of Mormon thought we still have no genuine Mormon aesthetic theory.”Such a statement might initially strike the reader as a bit out of date considering the abundance of writing on Mormon aesthetics since Bradshaw penned those words.However, that very abundance illustrates the existence of an ongoing conversation about Mormon aesthetics that reflects the difficulty Bradshaw mentions.

& the day that i believe is known as pentecost to some

(((some 50 days later)))  
nostalgia tempts us—to long for early spring and the newly risen—
the surprise at the open tomb 
the gingersnaps & the whoopie pies & today