DiaBLOGue

Let there be light, the goddess shouted
when she struck up the match
and pressed its flame onto a patch
of wiggling hydrogen. Flares spouted

The holiest things are always veiled:

sealed sections of holy writ
sacramental emblems
holy of holies
Her

Beehive Girl is a delightful book. Mikayla Orton Thatcher takes the reader on her journey completing the 1915 Beehive Girls program—an invigorating and intensive achievement plan for young women in the Church of Jesus Christ…

Julie Them, the focal character of Theric Jepson’s new novel Just Julie’s Fine, is a Mary Sue character: “so perfect every reader hates her” while “in the fictional world all people, heroes and villains alike,…

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterward.—Wallace Stegner They must have had names. To us…

I wish I had stopped my mom from talking to the hardcore punk band at that rest stop in western PA. I will stop my mom from talking to the hardcore punk band at that…

William Jankowiak’s book Illicit Monogamy provides an in-depth look at the intricacies of life in plural families within a specific fundamentalist Mormon community referred to as Angel Park. His work is monumental for its analysis…

I didn’t open it for a few months after receiving I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders. I had been delighted when asked to review it, but when the time came, anxiety overwhelmed me. I knew I would see myself in this book in an intimate, painful way, even though many of the narratives don’t directly reflect my own lived experiences. It was clear that reading this anthology of essays would make me feel vulnerable, striking close to my little queer heart, but I knew it would be healing to feel seen.

“I am finally no longer asked to believe in things for which not only is there no evidence, but which the evidence strongly condemns on fair inspection. . . . Let me be clear: I believe in God,…

For Mormonism’s nearly two-century existence, few subjects have brought it more into the public spotlight than polygamy. Most writers and scholars have focused on Joseph Smith as they told this story. Until Todd Compton came…