Spring 2022
The Spring 2022 issue is a special one. “Heavenly Mother in Critical Context” begins with Art Editor Margaret Olsen Hemming on "The Divine Feminine in Mormon Art" and continues with Margaret Toscano's "In Defense of Heavenly Mother: Her Critical Importance for Mormon Culture and Theology." Other highlights include, “Guides to Heavenly Mother: An Interview with McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding. And love the cover? It was carefully curated by Andi Pitcher Davis. You can read more about Sara Lynne Lindsay's cover art here. The issue is full of other fascinating scholarship, as well as personal essays and poetry all in honor of Heavenly Mother.
For the first century of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, members generally did not condone artistic renderings of deity, including those of Christ.[1] It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Mormon…
Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 37
Marginalizing God the Mother does not solve the problems raised by Mormonism’s doctrine of divine and human embodiment. It merely diminishes femaleness as a reflection of divinity. We do not need fewer images to understand God; we need more. Critics of Heavenly Mother have not fully grasped the negative consequences of moving toward a God beyond gender
Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 69–98
Although the concept of Heavenly Mother is empowering for many women, the focus on God as a cisgender, heterosexual couple also limits who can see their own divinity reflected in the stories told about God. First, with Heavenly Mother as the only female divinity, divine expression of womanhood is restricted to motherhood. This excludes many women, including women struggling with infertility, women who do not wish to become mothers, and transgender women who experience motherhood differently than fertile, cisgender women.
Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 99–118
Mormon feminists should consider how to better include intersex, nonbinary, and trans women in their ambitions. Queerness is more than homosexuality.
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.
Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 135-166
When Dialogue asked us to write a personal article about our process of writing A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother (D Street Press, 2020), we were delighted.
Podcast version of this piece. [one] My belly is expanding. It is not as much as I had expected—nothing like the maternity models (who I suspect might not even be pregnant) who now populate my…
Podcast version of this piece. It was not in a grove of trees, and I did not see a pillar of light when I first communed with Heavenly Mother. Instead, I was lying crumpled on…
Podcast version of this piece. I try to strengthen my relationship with my Heavenly Mother, but I’m not always sure how. Some days I sing, “Heavenly Mother, are you really there? And do you hear…
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.
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.
Podcast version of this piece. Embrace the first and forever night,Heartening as this Moon journeys from crestingTo full-figured, and in this ecstasy begins to fallEarthward, pulling me down to orchards heavyAnd underground, into mysteries of…
Podcast version of this piece. i. In the beginning, Mother worked yleminto a loose sphere. A swirl of stray particles, stirred by the breeze blown through herstudio window, circled her workbench, tickled her nose. She…
Podcast version of this piece. He makes the light and the primeval oceans and the rapturous Word, but I have the dirt the ground the chthonic underbelly and sustenance of all. I have the jewel-toned…
Podcast version of this piece. Let us amass our wandering kicks, wondering in awe at thesecostumes her womb hath made. O Motherof the sacred hearts, sing your peasant lullabies before our every sleep. Ring like…
Podcast version of this piece. won’t you agree with me the heart’s a glorious organ moon jelly a ghost heart throbbing in oceanlily bulb an earth heart humming undergroundbear a furred heart curled up in cave’s dark I’m…
Podcast version of this piece. If there is a literal bookon a plinth of filigreed gold, and an angelstanding as sentinel at heaven’s needle-eye entrance, who’s not to sayour names appear etchedon its pages, un-erasable.…
Podcast version of this piece. Here’s the truth: My faith remainstepid. Lukewarm as summer rain. Spew-worthy. A compass in fragments, I saved pieces: base plate, arrow, needle.Reassembly is beyond me. Millennia ago, I stood on…
Podcast version of this piece. I AM the children sleeping under mylar in a Texas warehouse.I AM the fathers lifting toddlers to their shoulders on our journeyto safety and rest. I’m safety and rest. But…
Podcast version of this piece. I baptized you before you were born. After, rubbed you clean.I’ll cleanse all your wounds in season. You’ve forgottenhow to savor my holy. If you seek,you’ll find these veins run…
Podcast version of this piece. They had agreedthat if she were seenthe boy wouldn’t be believedin seeing them.Nevertheless, she was there,her iridescent spherea coronaover their column of sun,reflecting,refractingthe morning.The flowers turned to her,the green of…
