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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.

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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

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 whoAwakened the Universe with a wordAnd set the Cosmos afire. God-Mom and God-Dad— Stretching forth our hands,We pluck from the Tree of Life.For our mortal lives to be sustained,creaturely blood must be…

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 on…

What the Second Coming Means to People Like Me

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

Dealing with Difficult Questions

Being, A Household World

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

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

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

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

Dominion in the Anthropocene

Review: 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).

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?

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

Sweater

Timo’s Blessing

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

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

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

On Solace

From the Pulpit: Creating a Zion Church

Review: Priesthood Power Jonathan A. Stapley. The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology download

Roundtable: 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.”

Roundtable: 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.

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

From the Pulpit: I’ve Got a Feeling

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Review: Nothing by Itself George B. Handley. American Fork

Review: Expertly Built: Stories within Stories Tim Wirkus. The Infinite Future

Personal Voices: Cry for the Gods: Grief and Return

Personal Voices: Three Sealings

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

From the Pulpit: 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.”

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

Review: Old Words, New Work: Reclamation and Remembrance

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

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

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

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

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

Review: A Candid and Dazzling Conversation Patrick Madden. Sublime Physick: Essays

Review: 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…

Review: Attempts to Be Whole Scott Abbott. Immortal for Quite Some Time

Review: The Truth is in the Middle Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood. Mormonism for Beginners

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

Review: Invisible Men / Invincible Women Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories

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…

New Voices: Flaming

How to Build a Paradox: Making the New Jerusalem

Deus Mea Lux Est: A Mormon Among Catholics

Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic among Mormons

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

Ordination and Blessing

Mormon/Catholic Dialogue: Thinking About Ways Forward

Leveling the Earth, Expanding the Circle

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

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

Review: Finding Mormon Theology Again Terryl L. Givens.Wrestling the Angel: TheFoundations of Mormon Thought:Cosmos, God, Humanity

Review: A Not-So-Innocent Abroad Craig Harline.Way Lower than theAngels: The Pretty Clearly TroubledBut Not Even Close to Tragic Confessionsof a Real Live Mormon Missionary

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.” 

Especially the Friends

My Personal Brand of Weirdness

Homeless Memories; So Many Firsts

Spiritually Housed; In a Magical Place

Wonderful Small Things

Holding a Master Key

Treasures

Anchored with Meaning

So Glad, So Sad …; My Spiritual Home

Falling in Immediate Love; Training Sessions

Always Sacred; Not Your Typical Mormon Space

We Should Do A Study

Hermeneutic Adventures in Home Teaching: Mary and Richard Rorty

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

Hidden Treasures

Review: Too Long Ignored

Review: Characters to Care About

Review: Re-Creating the Bible

Review: The Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered

El Problema del Dolor/The Problem of Pain

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

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

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

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

“Take No Thought”

Immortal for Quite Some Time (an excerpt)

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

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

Scry Me a River

Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder

Image and Reality in the Utah Zion

To Bless and Sanctify: Three Meditations on the Sacrament

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

Harrell’s Mettle: Jack Harrell. A Sense of Order and Other Stories

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

Immortal for Quite Some Time

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

Philip Lindholm, ed., Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority

Charles Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology

David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America

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”

Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures

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”

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

Review: A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman, eds. Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision

Personal Revelation Narratives: An Interview with Tom Mould

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

“Questions at the Veil”

Review: Adam S. Miller. Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

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

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

Deep Cheer

Divertissement

Bo Knows Heaven

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

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

Response

Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Quest for Respectability

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

From the Pulpit: Charity on the Rocks

From the Pulpit: Of Cups and Councils

Review: 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 Terryl

What Kind of Monster

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

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

By the Mouth of Two or Three

Personal Voices: Living and Dying in the Realm of Forgetful People

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

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

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

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 whoAwakened the Universe with a wordAnd set the Cosmos afire. God-Mom and God-Dad— Stretching forth our hands,We pluck from the Tree of Life.For our mortal lives to be sustained,creaturely blood must be…

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 on…

What the Second Coming Means to People Like Me

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

Dealing with Difficult Questions

Being, A Household World

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

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

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

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

Dominion in the Anthropocene

Review: 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).

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?

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

Sweater

Timo’s Blessing

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

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

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

On Solace

From the Pulpit: Creating a Zion Church

Review: Priesthood Power Jonathan A. Stapley. The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology download

Roundtable: 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.”

Roundtable: 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.

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

From the Pulpit: I’ve Got a Feeling

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Review: Nothing by Itself George B. Handley. American Fork

Review: Expertly Built: Stories within Stories Tim Wirkus. The Infinite Future

Personal Voices: Cry for the Gods: Grief and Return

Personal Voices: Three Sealings

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

From the Pulpit: 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.”

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

Review: Old Words, New Work: Reclamation and Remembrance

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

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

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

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

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

Review: A Candid and Dazzling Conversation Patrick Madden. Sublime Physick: Essays

Review: 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…

Review: Attempts to Be Whole Scott Abbott. Immortal for Quite Some Time

Review: The Truth is in the Middle Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood. Mormonism for Beginners

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

Review: Invisible Men / Invincible Women Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories

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…

New Voices: Flaming

How to Build a Paradox: Making the New Jerusalem

Deus Mea Lux Est: A Mormon Among Catholics

Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic among Mormons

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

Ordination and Blessing

Mormon/Catholic Dialogue: Thinking About Ways Forward

Leveling the Earth, Expanding the Circle

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

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

Review: Finding Mormon Theology Again Terryl L. Givens.Wrestling the Angel: TheFoundations of Mormon Thought:Cosmos, God, Humanity

Review: A Not-So-Innocent Abroad Craig Harline.Way Lower than theAngels: The Pretty Clearly TroubledBut Not Even Close to Tragic Confessionsof a Real Live Mormon Missionary

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.” 

Especially the Friends

My Personal Brand of Weirdness

Homeless Memories; So Many Firsts

Spiritually Housed; In a Magical Place

Wonderful Small Things

Holding a Master Key

Treasures

Anchored with Meaning

So Glad, So Sad …; My Spiritual Home

Falling in Immediate Love; Training Sessions

Always Sacred; Not Your Typical Mormon Space

We Should Do A Study

Hermeneutic Adventures in Home Teaching: Mary and Richard Rorty

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

Hidden Treasures

Review: Too Long Ignored

Review: Characters to Care About

Review: Re-Creating the Bible

Review: The Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered

El Problema del Dolor/The Problem of Pain

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

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

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

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

“Take No Thought”

Immortal for Quite Some Time (an excerpt)

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

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

Scry Me a River

Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder

Image and Reality in the Utah Zion

To Bless and Sanctify: Three Meditations on the Sacrament

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

Harrell’s Mettle: Jack Harrell. A Sense of Order and Other Stories

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

Immortal for Quite Some Time

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

Philip Lindholm, ed., Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority

Charles Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology

David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America

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”

Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures

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”

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

Review: A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman, eds. Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision

Personal Revelation Narratives: An Interview with Tom Mould

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

“Questions at the Veil”

Review: Adam S. Miller. Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

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

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

Deep Cheer

Divertissement

Bo Knows Heaven

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

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

Response

Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Quest for Respectability

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

From the Pulpit: Charity on the Rocks

From the Pulpit: Of Cups and Councils

Review: 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 Terryl

What Kind of Monster

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

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

By the Mouth of Two or Three

Personal Voices: Living and Dying in the Realm of Forgetful People

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

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