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Three Mormon themed podcasts caught our ear this week, two of which featured Board Member Joanna Brooks. First the Sistas in Zion get reactions from with black members and others on the new Race and the Priesthood gospel topic page. Cathy Stokes, Marvin Perkins, Joanna Brooks all join them as guests.
With the recent official statement on Race and the Priesthood promoting discussions on “the difficult issue of prophets and apostles who are subject to the influences of culture and largely unexamined assumptions of their day that color their understandings of and impact their statements about sometimes very important matters,” Dan Wotherspoon over at the Mormon Matters podcast asks Joanna Brooks and Ronda Callister to open up their hearts in discussing their personal journey in finding “Peace with Human Prophets.”

Now that the Church has released its treatment of Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah, many of our people are going to be learning of the phenomenon of post-Manifesto polygamy for the first time. To get up to speed one can read, for example, Quinn, Hardy and Hales, but I would like to point folks to a more intimate account, from a woman’s perspective, as to why one might have entered into such a post-Manifesto marriage. The article I would like to suggest that you read is Julie Hemming Savage, “Hannah Grover Hegsted and Post-Manifesto Plural Marriage,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26/3 (Fall 1993): 100-117. I recommend this article not only because it is terrific, but the subject of the piece happens to be a relative of mine. My most famous Mormon ancestor was Thomas Grover through his wife Hannah Tupper. Their son, Thomas Grover III married Elizabeth Heiner. My great-grondmother was their first daughter and second child, Evelyn Maria Grover, born September 3, 1868. Hannah was her younger sister, born November 26, 1870. So Hannah was my Grandpa’s aunt.
Hannah Grover married Bishop Victor Hegsted on May 1, 1904, which was 14 years after the original Manifesto and a month after the second Manifesto. So why would a good Mormon woman enter plurality in 1904?

“Bound Hand and Foot with Graveclothes” a perspective on the new Race and the Priesthood page by Editor Kristine Haglund cross-posted at ByCommonConsent
I had never noticed before last Easter that Lazarus comes out of the tomb still “bound hand and foot with graveclothes.” He is not radiantly restored to life; he must have been a terrifying spectre. Jesus leaves it to those who believe to finish the miracle–to unbind their brother and be the ones who “let him go” by bidding him come back to them. God’s healing work was finished, but Lazarus could not be restored to life until those witnesses who “believed on” Jesus caught a glimpse of the life He came to offer, overcame their squeamishness and even their religious conviction that having anything to do with the dead was taboo, and went to work bringing Lazarus fully back into their communal life, which would be transformed forever by his return.
There’s a danger, of course, in drawing the parallels too closely, but I think there might be something for us to learn from this story in figuring out how we ought to respond to the remarkable statement on race and priesthood posted at lds.org

Rachel Farmer guest posts at Feminist Mormon Housewives to discuss her new art exhibit in New York, and describes her encounters with the archives of Dialogue.

It’s funny to exhibit my little ceramic pioneers here on the east coast. People wonder who they are and what they are doing. Are they prairie moms? Eastern European peasants? Pilgrims? What are those carts they are lugging around? Are they peddlers? One thing is certain – these women know how to work!
This fascination with my ancestry — and questions about my own place in the Mormon narrative — led my young nerdy self on a quest to read all the back-issues of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (that my parents kept conveniently stacked in their study).
The women I met on these pages forever changed my worldview: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Lavina Fielding Anderson. Though they wrote about contemporary feminist issues, it was their insights into Mormon women’s more independent and expansive role in the early church that gave me some extra backbone.