The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a global church based in the United States. The cultural context of the Church as a top-down, global entity with centralized leadership necessarily interacts with local…
The summer of 2021 brought a greatly anticipated event to the LDS-Mormon art community: the opening of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts’s gallery in Manhattan. Its inaugural exhibition, Great Awakening: Vision and Synthesis in…
Dialogue 56.1 (Spring 2023): 27–55
Enjoy an interview about this piece here.
Desiring to better understand how people are navigating these complex identity negotiations, I interviewed seven trans and/or gender nonconforming Mormons between eighteen and forty-four years old living in various regions of the United States as part of my graduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York
One of the certain harbingers of a presidential election year is the spate of campaign biographies about the major combatants. In fact, the publication of such books seems to be the sine qua non of…
I did not just sit down and say, “This is going to be a dance in eight parts.” It evolved. When I was finishing the choreography, I visited Josephine Withers (no relation), an historian of…
The bus to Sao Bento up through a complex development of valleys and mountainous jungle. The canopy of trees changes periodically during the slow ascent from the typical street-lining palms to heavier blocked rows of pines; then a tangled, thick, jungle-like fabric of wider trees mixes with hanging moss, vines, and flowering branches. This is then patched with isolated acres of white, pencil-like eucalyptus trees and a darker more majestic body of Pinheiros. These are tall, nut producing pines whose trunks rise up high from the earth and then burst at the top like fireworks with long branches that arch toward the sky and terminate in large green pompoms.
Last summer, while I was reading the Salt Lake Tribune, I stumbled across the obituary of a beautiful woman who looked uncannily like my older sister, Ann. That’s why I read her obituary. Only when I saw the list of Lisa McPhie’s survivors did I realize she was Lisa Lundberg, who had grown up with me on a quiet tree-lined street in Salt Lake City. Her older sisters were my best friends in junior high school. We were inseparable then. Thirty years later, Lisa, who watched our teenage escapades with a hint of boredom, was dead of a rare blood disorder that had defied diagnosis since she first became ill in 1985.
It’s six o’clock, time for dinner and Little House on the Prairie reruns. I walk up the stairs as my mom is pulling some string beans out of the microwave. She asks me if I’ll…
Jarring bang. Wheels leap up, rattling the heavy load of black piping destined for the oilrig. The truck rolls on. Oblivious to what it left behind. On the macadam, a coyote. From its sacrum back…
“No Hard Feelings” is an inspiring folk ballad about finding peace in dying. The Avett Brothers ask: “When my body won’t hold me anymore. And it finally lets me free. Will I be ready?” and…