For our Dialogue Gospel Study (14 March 2021) on Doctrine and Covenants 25, Melody Newey Johnson asked participants to write down a word, words, or phrases that came to mind when they thought of Emma…
Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 69–79
Five years after my excommunication, I met and entered into a relationship with the man who is my husband to this day. We became a couple in 1991; we held a public commitment ceremony in 1995, a time when same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the United States; we purchased a home together in 1996; and we legally married in California in 2008. Regardless of how or why I was excommunicated in 1986, current Church policy is such that if I were a member, my bishop would have grounds for excommunicating me now, and I cannot currently be reinstated into membership.
Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 108–123
I felt free. I felt empowered. I might fall in love and get married, or
I might not. Either way would be fine. I didn’t need to have the same
life path as all of my friends and family. I realized that I am the way I
am, and I couldn’t change it. I needed to respect it. I had to listen to
myself, and not to everyone around me, including Church leaders. I
had to follow my heart and do what makes me happy, and it would all
get figured out in the end.
I grew up in Snowflake, which lies in desert country in Arizona, altitude 5600 feet. Alof Larson and May Hunt, my parents, were among the early arrivals to this pioneer settlement, named for Erastus Snow…
Elsewhere in this issue Robert Flanders speaks of the New Mormon History as having begun in 1945 with the publication of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History. While Brodie’s book is certainly pivotal, an…
The Mormon Church is a formidable broadcast institution. Through subsidiary corporations and institutions it owns sixteen radio and television stations, a sophisticated international broadcast distribution system, a Washington news bureau, a cable TV system and production and consulting divisions.
When I was a restless teenager growing up Mormon in a small southern California ward, it seemed that the only topic to which our unruly Sunday school class responded was the fate of the lost…
Last summer I was asked to respond to a paper on the LDS garment, given by Colleen McDannell at the Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium. Her paper, to appear as a chapter in her forthcoming…
From the 1950s to the 1980s Ezra Taft Benson was at the center of a series of political conflicts within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1943 he became a member of…
“Let’s see what sort of surprises await us in Jennifer’s story,” Jean-Paul said wearily and shuffled the story pages on his desk, as though by doing so he would impose order on narrative chaos. What…