Volume 58, No. 1

A foundational tenet and raison d’être of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that a Great Apostasy occurred within the first few centuries of the early Christian era, resulting in the withdrawal…

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.—William S. Burroughs (1914–1997)[1] Joseph Smith ascended to the revered position of…

From 1986 to 1993, I was history curator at the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the spring and summer of 1993, I was preparing an exhibit on the…

I don’t know who was sick. Maybe it was you. Let’s say it was.

You were sick and I was probably more worried than you (as per usual) but we brought our faith to our prayers and we pled that you would be healed. I anointed your head with oil. And I sealed that anointing and blessed you.

Dear Editor, I respect Clyde Ford as a scholar and peacemaker, two roles we have in common. I also appreciate his challenges (“Reconsidering Reconciliation,” in Dialogue 57, no. 2 [Summer 2024], 1–3) to my article…

My grandma was a collector. Of dolls, spoons, PEZ dispensers. When she died six years ago, all ten of her children were able to redistribute her hundreds of lovingly collected Nativity sets representing dozens of…

I am a young mother. My arms have been full of putti almost exclusively for the past several years. I’ve done the work of mothering full-time for nearly the last decade of my life, and…

I don’t want to let go of the rod. I don’t want to drift off and end up on paths that are dark, strange, and lonely. Sometimes I worry I may have already wandered without…

I am religious
the way small desert towns
are named after water;
eleven or twenty worn buildings,
brown hills, dust.

No Celestial room has ever compared
to the stalk of yellow bluestem held in my son’s teeth
three-quarters of a mile into a Sunday afternoon walk,
      feathered seeds dancing with every step.

Were they fake news? Etched
on tin? Did the boy prophet
really find them sequestered

Under the dome above, we look up,
singing children’s canticles,
our own domed hearts
clutched by the promise

Bread aisle for tortillas          an infant’s hand around my finger                    sold-out souls                              sharing beans and lentils                                        in Babylon, but I’ve been warned, I think.          Sand spitting in the wind                    sun-faded advertisements for                              lip balm modeled…

Ryan Habermeyer lays down the gauntlet immediately in Salt Folk with “La Petite Mort,” a series of micro-vignettes about a professional elephant masturbator (she is never referred to by any other appellation than “the elephant…

This collection of essays provides important new analyses of several of the religious groups that make up the broader Restoration movement begun by Joseph Smith Jr. in 1830, what the editors of this collection call…

The Mountain Meadows Massacre is a hugely important (and hugely tragic) topic in the history of both Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That is why it is so notable that…

“Rebecca had heard her father and others call this land God’s country often enough that she wasn’t as surprised as she might have been to come upon him, one warm spring evening, sitting on the…

In her introduction to her book Katabasis, Heather Harris-Bergevin quotes someone who accused her at one time of “consorting with witches.” The word “witch” comes from an Old English “wicce,” meaning “female magician or sorceress.”…

Media scholars, take note: Mason Kamana Allred’s Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism is a haunting must-read that will leave you ghost hunting across other lanes of media history. After pointing…

Genealogical research has long played a prominent role in the theology and lived religious experiences of individuals, families, and communities associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Given this reality, one…

Good morning. It is an honor to speak to you today on the holiest of Sabbaths, when we come together to celebrate the resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Easter is, of course, a day of rejoicing. The events of Holy Week leading up to Easter—Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane and the Crucifixion—all lead inexorably to the joyful conclusion that “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”