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Ten Fictions about My Father

1  First he went down to Pappy’s pasture. The pasture was a strip of marshy land down the hill from our house, sandwiched by the inter state and train tracks where Pappy kept his cows.…

Hurt or Make Afraid

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, In His house full of light, Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; There the saints will shine bright.  William Clayton, 1846  I’m cold. We’ve been walking…

Fish Stories

Although it had never been formally declared or written in cursive on a piece of parchment, Jolene understood her place in the family hierarchy. She was right there between the ancient golden retriever and the…

That the Glory of God Might Be Manifest

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology

Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology”  was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times.⁠ To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article. 

Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Katy, My Sister

We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…

All Content

Making the Shadow Conscious | Rachel Rueckert, East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung I’ll start with both a declaration and a disclaimer: East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with…

Knot Theory

A knot can be a beautiful thing. A knot can reveal truths about how the world works. Some people are so enraptured by knots, they dedicate their lives to studying them. I’m devoting no energy…

First Place: Times and Seasons

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. They came to us just before spring arrived, at the same time I began putting seeds into the ground in my garden. Lettuce, spinach, arugula.…

Third Place: All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal. —Doctrine & Covenants 29:31 The therapist I had…

Sister’s Visions

Her eyelids were closing. It must have been the stillness in the room that made her realize. The two young elders advanced their slides across the laptop screen and it felt late. She nodded slowly.…

Fear, Faith, and Other F-Words

Podcast version of this piece. I’m sitting in the bishop’s office. My dress is slightly damp, but I can’t determine whether the moisture is a result of the snowstorm or sweat beading beneath the cotton.…

Thoughts on the Sacrament During a Pandemic

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The sacrament feels like a medical procedure these days. It’s passed by men, not boys. I wondered about that requirement until I looked around the chapel at our scanty,…

The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.

Bode and Iris

Listen to the piece here. It may seem odd that an experienced fornicator like Bode Carpenter would get the girl pregnant in the first place—particularly because he carried a condom in the watch pocket of…

Sweater

Mere Tears and Torrents, Signs and Seals: The Sweet Semantic Everything of Troubled Love Matthew James Babcock. Four Tales of Troubled Love

Review: A Private Revelation William Victor Smith. Textual Studies of the Doctrine and Covenants: The Plural Marriage Revelation

Roundtable: When Did You Become Black?

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”

From the Pulpit: My Mother’s Eclipse

Light Departure

For Doug Thayer  There was a knock at the apartment door. My companion, Carr, slouched at his desk, tinkering with a delicate butterfly he’d just formed from a piece of thin copper wire he’d retrieved…

City of Saints

When Dennis Cormier arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City, his first appointment was already waiting. The visitor was fleshy, jowls and hips, about Dennis’ age, and…

The Shyster

Arne met Leanne Holburn at church during his final year in an MBA program at the University of Washington. He found her very attractive. Of medium height, she had sculpted cheeks, an aquiline nose, and…

Come to Zion

Six months after she’d divorced her most recent husband, Sue kicked back the silk sheets one chilly morning and decided to take back her maiden name. She packed her bags, grabbed a cab to Charles…

AMEN

“Dear Heavenly Father,” I began, “please help me do well on this test.” I was on my way to the Garfield Community Center in the Central District to take a skills test for a City…

Personal Voices: Still Making Sense of Suffering: Ruminations on Thirty-Five Years with Multiple Sclerosis

Personal Voices: I Am Not Your Trigger

Personal Voices: Spare the Rod

The Intimacy of Fatherhood

The Home Teacher

Bishop warned Brock Hartman ahead of time. “They’ll ask for a food order.”  He opened a desk drawer and took out a binder filled with requisitions for the storehouse.  “But they have a decent income…

What Happened Sunday Morning

When Danny DiLorenzo got up to speak I was thinking about how I could loosen my tie. My mother makes me wear one, and after an hour my body fights back. I stand in front…

Personal Voices: Eyes to See

I. Seeing Not . . . because they seeing not . . . Matthew 13:13 My first pair of glasses had green plastic rims and Coke-bottle thick, anti-glare-coated lenses, which reflected green light. In every…

Personal Voices: The Unending Conversation

The Missing Mrs.

Look at Me — I Am Your Son

Look at me, man, look at me! Get your veined nose off the grindstone;remove your ground sun glasses;see the sun, feel it. It is there; I remember it from my childhood(Was it yesterday or forever ago?)prickling upon…

This-Worldly and Other-Worldly Sex: A Response

Carl Broderick’s essay treats many aspects of sex in an objective, discreet, and interesting way which should be helpful to Latter-day Saints, both in personal and family living and also in their responsibilities in the…

Three Philosophies of Sex, Plus One

The question of human sexuality and how it shall be interpreted and incorporated into life is one that every comprehensive philosophy of life must cope with. My strong conviction of this grows partly out of…

The Death of a Son

There was not even a 48-hour warning between the first x-rays of Kelden’s knee and the surgery which amputated his leg. When his physician-father took him for x-rays Sunday afternoon instead of waiting until Monday,…

The Divorced Latter-day Saint

Two marriages, two divorces, and years of living alone had helped make my aunt an independent, matter-of-fact sort of person. But she seemed almost too casual that night in 1956 when she told me my…

Why Latter-day Saint Girls Marry Outside the Church

Question: Why do Latter-day Saint girls marry non-Mormons?  Answers: “L.D.S. boys are away on missions or at school, and those not away date non-L.D.S. girls.” “L.D.S. boys don’t date much, but L.D.S. girls want to…

Expectations and Fulfillment: Changing Roles in Marriage

Mormons have a deep spiritual belief in the validity of joy. While sorrow and frustration are accepted features of all lives, we believe that in partnership with God’s spirit and plan we can minimize sorrow…

Free Agency and Conformity in Family Life

The scriptures[1] and the teachings of the Church leaders about free agency indicate that man should pursue life according to free choice and on the assumption that he can and should use his intelligence, capabilities,…

Church Influence Upon the Family

President David O. McKay described the two major purposes of the Church during the General Priesthood Meeting of the October, 1966, General Conference. The first is that of taking the message of the restoration to…

Technological Change and Erosion of the Patriarchal Family

Technological change is adequately recognized as a pervading influence in American and, to a lesser degree, Western European life. Technological progress is measured by the ability of technology to increase the output of a unit…

The Mormon Family in the Modern World: Introduction

Not only is the family the primary social institution in Mormonism, it is also much too large a theme for a special section in one issue of Dialogue. Hopefully, the Journal will be able to…

Grandpa’s Place

My grandfather, for whom I was named, was born in 1878 in a four-room stone house built by his father in Round Valley, near Morgan, Utah. My great grandfather had a small farm there and a job on the Union Pacific Railroad, but in the spring of 1883…

A Latter-day Ode to Irrigation

In 1907 J. J. McClellan, then organist for the Mormon Tabernacle, published a new choral suite under the extravagant title, “Ode to Irrigation.” The first of five choruses described in heavy Victorian prose a truly…

Poor Mother

We have a new baby in our family. Soon after Amy was born, our oldest son introduced himself to the woman who was building a house behind ours. “And how many children are there in…

Greg

When Greg woke up he lay on his stomach. The shaft of sunlight coming through the window hit his gold tennis trophy, Kellie’s gold-framed picture and his clock on top of the dresser. Priesthood meeting…

Living with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Wife’s Perspective

“Frank, please sit up here,” I pleaded, patting the doctor’s examination table and urging my husband forward. I was trying to be patient. By nature I move fast, and holding myself back to accommodate his slowness…

The Nursing Home

My mother was eighty-four, a widow of six months, and badly crippled with arthritis in the fall of 1981. She was also virtually blind. For the past six months, her eight children had watched anxiously…

Mary Ann

It was one of those crisp November days in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when I heard the news. Snuggled under a quilt, I was reading to my two young sons when the telephone interrupted us. It was…

And Baby Makes Two: Choosing Single Motherhood

As a school teacher in Tooele—junior high science/English—I carpool the forty miles from Salt Lake City every day. I had always assumed, as teens turned into twenties, that someday I would be married and raise…

Promise to Grandma

When Sarah Roundy Sylvester was fighting death in the fall of 1938 she must have felt her life was unsuccessful. The promises of a good education, the status of a significant and unusual Church assignment,…

“In Jeopardy Every Hour”

When my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abigail, and I went to the hospital, I left the pie crusts and rolls I had mixed up that morning on the kitchen table along with the dress pattern I had bought for my new niece. It had been months since I had felt this energetic, and so that morning I had begun a few projects while I waited for our sixth child to be born. The telephone awakened me from my after-lunch nap; the pediatrician wanted to see me in his office to discuss Abby’s blood test results. 

Religion and Suicide: A Records-Linkage Study

Since the early studies of the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, suicide has interested sociologists. But suicide, by its very nature, has resisted study, and the problem of studying it has not eased over the years.…

Four Characteristics of the Mormon Family: Contemporary Research on Chastity, Conjugality, Children, and Chauvinism

From its inception, Mormonism has been characterized by a blend of traditional American culture mixed with unique, sometimes even radical, elements. The nineteenth-century Mormon family combined aspects of Puritan family morality with a unique theology…

To Watch a Daughter Die

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Three Poems for My Mother

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Grandpa’s Coffee

It is a morning flight. We have gained altitude and are somewhere over the Colorado Rockies. Below, through breaks in the clouds, a thin film of early snowfall covers the mountaintops like a veil. High…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: East Meets West

I have enthusiastically accepted the invitation to share my experiences as a “cultural Jew” married to a “cultural Mormon.” Kenneth and I have been married almost twenty-three years. I have lived in Salt Lake City since 1971 and before that for nine months when we were first married. 

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Through a Stained-Glass Window

Let me start by saying that I did not pick the title for this panel —I am not yet convinced that I have survived the experience intact. How ever, after more than fifteen years of…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: “To Celebrate the Marriage Feast Which Has No End”

Friends often ask me what it is like to be an active Lutheran layperson married to an active Latter-day Saint. I think I can best describe my marriage experience by addressing my comments to my…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Introductory Remarks

Members of other religions, or persons with no religious affiliation, take on special challenges when they marry Latter-day Saints. In addition to the same problems any inter-faith marriage might encounter—conflicts over church attendance, child-rearing, value…

Heart of the Fathers

The Child is father to the Man  Wordsworth You wake before the alarm you’d set for 4:30. You dress, almost ritually, and decide to fast. Today of all days you must maintain the proper mood—and…

Confessions of a Utah Gambler

The old hometown, Ogden, Utah, has long been an overlooked sports town. That is, if you take the adjective overlooked in an underground or an underworld sense, and if you broaden “sporting men” to include…

Rhythms

My father’s heart is strong and scarred, bound in spots by thread, a delicate patchwork of veiny fabrics. I imagine, when I talk to him on the telephone, his physical presence. I can hear his…

Why Am I Here?

I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”

For Meg — With Doubt and Faith

In times of drought, it is hard to remember times of flood. After yet another California winter without sufficient water, we take quick showers, rarely flush the toilet, let our lawn grow long to hide…

Hallelujah?

Fatherless Child

A Jew Among Mormons

Demographics of the Contemporary Mormon Family

Who We Are, Where We Come From

Blessing the Dog

He waited, but the dog didn’t come.  He went back into the house. His wife was strapping on her brassiere, skin spilling over where the strap was tight.  “Seen the dog?” he said.  “Haen’t my…

If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.

“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology

Sparrow Hunter

On Meditation

Brother Melrose

The old man walked out from under the line of high, heavy trees bordering the cemetery. He stopped. He looked up, blinking his eyes. He held his hands palms up to the fading April sunlight.…

Measures of Music

It came then that Sara dreamed of the flood. It had been the news for weeks, cities all along the Front sandbagging streets, sidewalks, driveways, window wells, a mudslide that made a lake over a…

Elijah’s Calling: 1840-41 (from This Could Be the Dawning of That Day)

The following chapter is excerpted from One More River to Cross, the title of the first novel of a trilogy to be called Standing on the Promises being published by Deseret Book beginning in August…

There is Always Someplace Else (From There is Always Someplace Else)

In 1957, a year and a half before she married the man who would leave her, Kören Dixon was almost the Carnival Queen of Conjuring Creek. There were only three nominations for the job, and…

Down on Batlle’s Farm

Gay and Lesbian Mormons: Interviews with James Kent, Former Executive Director of Affirmation, and with Aaron Cloward, Founder and Coordinator of Gay LDS Youth

Dialogue 33.3 (Fall 2000): 123–136
Hugo Oliaz intervews two important figures in LDS LGBTQ organzing, a former diretor of Affirmation and the founder of Gay LDS Youth, a group that briefly flourished in the early 2000s. A great resource for learning more about LDS LGBTQ organizing in this period. 

The Truth, the Partial Truth, Something Like the Truth, So Help Me God

Philosophical Christian Apology Meets “Rational” Mormon Theology

On “Defense of Marriage” A Reply to Quinn

In a reply to Quinn’s article in the same issue, Armand Mauss questioned whether the church was motivated by homophobia or a more benevolent force.

Prelude to the National “”Defense of Marriage”” Campaign: Civil Discrimination Against Feared or Despised Minorities

This is an early 50+ page article documenting LDS political activity in the 1990s on same-sex marriage, culminating in Prop 22. Quinn’s explanation was that homophobia provided the best explanation for LDS prejudice against same-sex…

David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the Foundation for the 1978 Revelation

A Voice from the Land of Zion: Elder Erastus Snow in Denmark 1850 to 1852

The Danish Genesis of Virginia Sorensen’s Lotte’s Locket

Eggertsen Men: Male Family Influences in Virginia Sorensen’s Kingdom Come and the Evening and the Morning

History, Memory and Imagination in Virginia Eggertsen Sorensen’s Kingdom Come

Keepsakes

On the day of her funeral, my mother’s two sister-wives put on a dinner in her honor. Sister Karen and Sister Sharlene spent the morning before the services baking pies and fresh bread, making potato…

Grandpa and the Petrified Oysters

Whenever I visited my grandparents, I always knew where to check for Granddad. As a means of escaping household routine, he maintained a remote kingdom, a long shed deep in the interior of the backyard…

Our Big Fat Temple Weddings: Who’s In, Who’s Out, and How We Get Together

Belonging

Mind, Body, and the Boundary Waters

Grandpa’s Visit

Cemetery Life

Scenes from the Movie

Plinka, Plinka, Plinka

What You Don’t Know

The Homecoming

Elder Jeff Lee Johnson came home on January 24 at 2:14 in the afternoon. The plane had made its way north all that day, stopping in Miami, then Atlanta before finally arriving six minutes ahead…

Toward a “”Marriage Group”” of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories

Thanksgiving

Beth: Listening  “Take care,” says my Grandma Tess. She is the first one to leave after Thanksgiving dinner because she can’t drive at night. She’s got two hours’ driving to do, south to Salt Lake.…

Brown

I’m mostly brown. I have brown hair and, in summer, brown skin. It’s not a pretty golden brown like the models in the tanning lotion ads. It’s a kind of ashy, dirty brown. My eyes…

Miracle

Lucille Wentworth sat in her working on her cross-stitch, watching Judy and Ray hold hands, sitting across from her on the couch. It was late, past one; they’d talked for hours, the conversation flowing around…

’Atta Boy

Latham Runyon wondered what time he ought to close his window. It was going to be a tongue-hanger today. But for now, the morning was still dewy and bearable.  He pulled his half-glasses up to…

Homecomings

At Eastside School in Idaho Falls, they gave us a full hour for lunch; and like most of the kids, I went home each day. Mom always had my lunch ready. I’d gulp it down…

White Shell

There are pieces of white shell sifted with the sands and soils of Dinetah that confuse newcomers and outsiders. Tourists look at the shells like puzzle pieces, trying to force them into what they know.…

Heloise and Abelard

“We’ll get there by ten.” Nod and look behind, dance a quickstep ahead of the noise of a thousand feet on the wet pavement of Liege. Feels strange to be thrown into a world you’re…

En Route: A Journey of the Spirit

Sister Love

“You’re acting like a child,” said Karen.  “I’m not,” said Lynn, and looked with determination at her dinner plate. She could feel Karen’s anger vibrating against her skin. “Oh, don’t talk to me—”  Lynn glanced…

Follow Me, Boys

The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…

Frau Ruster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance

Depression and the Brethren of the Priesthood

Seeds of Faith in City Soil: Growing Up Mormon in New York City

The Blessing

You never can tell what April is going to be like in Boise. Sometimes you get sunshine, sometimes you get rain, and sometimes you get blizzards that roar out of the canyons. I died in…

Entertaining Angels Unaware

Lucy hated arguing with her companion in public, even though they argued in English so most people couldn’t understand what they were saying, and those who did could probably care less. They didn’t argue often,…

The Beings I Love Are Creatures

A Visit for Tregan

Tregan Weaver was driving home from Madison High in his little black CRX on the first warm day of spring in Rexburg, Idaho. The trees along Main Street were in blossom, the lawns were turning…

Gentle Persuasions

I I often went with my father on home teaching visits when I was ten and eleven. I don’t remember why his companions were never around. I suppose they were inactive. Back then, inactivity wasn’t…

Buildings

May Many Phoenixes Rise

A Deep Reverence in My Heart; Part of Our Family

Looked like a Church, Sounded like a Church; How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

Move Back in a Heartbeat

The Bonds Endure; Freudian Analysis of Lehi’s Dream

Tribute to a Building; Giving Church a Try

Not Different from My Home

Equally Warm, Whether Empty or Full

Not the Building

An Anchor for Me

Matzoh for Sacrament

Ten Fictions about My Father

1  First he went down to Pappy’s pasture. The pasture was a strip of marshy land down the hill from our house, sandwiched by the inter state and train tracks where Pappy kept his cows.…

Hurt or Make Afraid

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, In His house full of light, Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; There the saints will shine bright.  William Clayton, 1846  I’m cold. We’ve been walking…

Fish Stories

Although it had never been formally declared or written in cursive on a piece of parchment, Jolene understood her place in the family hierarchy. She was right there between the ancient golden retriever and the…

That the Glory of God Might Be Manifest

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology

Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology”  was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times.⁠ To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article. 

Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Katy, My Sister

We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…

Making the Shadow Conscious | Rachel Rueckert, East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung I’ll start with both a declaration and a disclaimer: East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with…

Knot Theory

A knot can be a beautiful thing. A knot can reveal truths about how the world works. Some people are so enraptured by knots, they dedicate their lives to studying them. I’m devoting no energy…

First Place: Times and Seasons

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. They came to us just before spring arrived, at the same time I began putting seeds into the ground in my garden. Lettuce, spinach, arugula.…

Third Place: All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal. —Doctrine & Covenants 29:31 The therapist I had…

Sister’s Visions

Her eyelids were closing. It must have been the stillness in the room that made her realize. The two young elders advanced their slides across the laptop screen and it felt late. She nodded slowly.…

Fear, Faith, and Other F-Words

Podcast version of this piece. I’m sitting in the bishop’s office. My dress is slightly damp, but I can’t determine whether the moisture is a result of the snowstorm or sweat beading beneath the cotton.…

Thoughts on the Sacrament During a Pandemic

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The sacrament feels like a medical procedure these days. It’s passed by men, not boys. I wondered about that requirement until I looked around the chapel at our scanty,…

The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.

Bode and Iris

Listen to the piece here. It may seem odd that an experienced fornicator like Bode Carpenter would get the girl pregnant in the first place—particularly because he carried a condom in the watch pocket of…

Sweater

Mere Tears and Torrents, Signs and Seals: The Sweet Semantic Everything of Troubled Love Matthew James Babcock. Four Tales of Troubled Love

Review: A Private Revelation William Victor Smith. Textual Studies of the Doctrine and Covenants: The Plural Marriage Revelation

Roundtable: When Did You Become Black?

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”

From the Pulpit: My Mother’s Eclipse

Light Departure

For Doug Thayer  There was a knock at the apartment door. My companion, Carr, slouched at his desk, tinkering with a delicate butterfly he’d just formed from a piece of thin copper wire he’d retrieved…

City of Saints

When Dennis Cormier arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City, his first appointment was already waiting. The visitor was fleshy, jowls and hips, about Dennis’ age, and…

The Shyster

Arne met Leanne Holburn at church during his final year in an MBA program at the University of Washington. He found her very attractive. Of medium height, she had sculpted cheeks, an aquiline nose, and…

Come to Zion

Six months after she’d divorced her most recent husband, Sue kicked back the silk sheets one chilly morning and decided to take back her maiden name. She packed her bags, grabbed a cab to Charles…

AMEN

“Dear Heavenly Father,” I began, “please help me do well on this test.” I was on my way to the Garfield Community Center in the Central District to take a skills test for a City…

Personal Voices: Still Making Sense of Suffering: Ruminations on Thirty-Five Years with Multiple Sclerosis

Personal Voices: I Am Not Your Trigger

Personal Voices: Spare the Rod

The Intimacy of Fatherhood

The Home Teacher

Bishop warned Brock Hartman ahead of time. “They’ll ask for a food order.”  He opened a desk drawer and took out a binder filled with requisitions for the storehouse.  “But they have a decent income…

What Happened Sunday Morning

When Danny DiLorenzo got up to speak I was thinking about how I could loosen my tie. My mother makes me wear one, and after an hour my body fights back. I stand in front…

Personal Voices: Eyes to See

I. Seeing Not . . . because they seeing not . . . Matthew 13:13 My first pair of glasses had green plastic rims and Coke-bottle thick, anti-glare-coated lenses, which reflected green light. In every…

Personal Voices: The Unending Conversation

The Missing Mrs.

Look at Me — I Am Your Son

Look at me, man, look at me! Get your veined nose off the grindstone;remove your ground sun glasses;see the sun, feel it. It is there; I remember it from my childhood(Was it yesterday or forever ago?)prickling upon…

This-Worldly and Other-Worldly Sex: A Response

Carl Broderick’s essay treats many aspects of sex in an objective, discreet, and interesting way which should be helpful to Latter-day Saints, both in personal and family living and also in their responsibilities in the…

Three Philosophies of Sex, Plus One

The question of human sexuality and how it shall be interpreted and incorporated into life is one that every comprehensive philosophy of life must cope with. My strong conviction of this grows partly out of…

The Death of a Son

There was not even a 48-hour warning between the first x-rays of Kelden’s knee and the surgery which amputated his leg. When his physician-father took him for x-rays Sunday afternoon instead of waiting until Monday,…

The Divorced Latter-day Saint

Two marriages, two divorces, and years of living alone had helped make my aunt an independent, matter-of-fact sort of person. But she seemed almost too casual that night in 1956 when she told me my…

Why Latter-day Saint Girls Marry Outside the Church

Question: Why do Latter-day Saint girls marry non-Mormons?  Answers: “L.D.S. boys are away on missions or at school, and those not away date non-L.D.S. girls.” “L.D.S. boys don’t date much, but L.D.S. girls want to…

Expectations and Fulfillment: Changing Roles in Marriage

Mormons have a deep spiritual belief in the validity of joy. While sorrow and frustration are accepted features of all lives, we believe that in partnership with God’s spirit and plan we can minimize sorrow…

Free Agency and Conformity in Family Life

The scriptures[1] and the teachings of the Church leaders about free agency indicate that man should pursue life according to free choice and on the assumption that he can and should use his intelligence, capabilities,…

Church Influence Upon the Family

President David O. McKay described the two major purposes of the Church during the General Priesthood Meeting of the October, 1966, General Conference. The first is that of taking the message of the restoration to…

Technological Change and Erosion of the Patriarchal Family

Technological change is adequately recognized as a pervading influence in American and, to a lesser degree, Western European life. Technological progress is measured by the ability of technology to increase the output of a unit…

The Mormon Family in the Modern World: Introduction

Not only is the family the primary social institution in Mormonism, it is also much too large a theme for a special section in one issue of Dialogue. Hopefully, the Journal will be able to…

Grandpa’s Place

My grandfather, for whom I was named, was born in 1878 in a four-room stone house built by his father in Round Valley, near Morgan, Utah. My great grandfather had a small farm there and a job on the Union Pacific Railroad, but in the spring of 1883…

A Latter-day Ode to Irrigation

In 1907 J. J. McClellan, then organist for the Mormon Tabernacle, published a new choral suite under the extravagant title, “Ode to Irrigation.” The first of five choruses described in heavy Victorian prose a truly…

Poor Mother

We have a new baby in our family. Soon after Amy was born, our oldest son introduced himself to the woman who was building a house behind ours. “And how many children are there in…

Greg

When Greg woke up he lay on his stomach. The shaft of sunlight coming through the window hit his gold tennis trophy, Kellie’s gold-framed picture and his clock on top of the dresser. Priesthood meeting…

Living with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Wife’s Perspective

“Frank, please sit up here,” I pleaded, patting the doctor’s examination table and urging my husband forward. I was trying to be patient. By nature I move fast, and holding myself back to accommodate his slowness…

The Nursing Home

My mother was eighty-four, a widow of six months, and badly crippled with arthritis in the fall of 1981. She was also virtually blind. For the past six months, her eight children had watched anxiously…

Mary Ann

It was one of those crisp November days in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when I heard the news. Snuggled under a quilt, I was reading to my two young sons when the telephone interrupted us. It was…

And Baby Makes Two: Choosing Single Motherhood

As a school teacher in Tooele—junior high science/English—I carpool the forty miles from Salt Lake City every day. I had always assumed, as teens turned into twenties, that someday I would be married and raise…

Promise to Grandma

When Sarah Roundy Sylvester was fighting death in the fall of 1938 she must have felt her life was unsuccessful. The promises of a good education, the status of a significant and unusual Church assignment,…

“In Jeopardy Every Hour”

When my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abigail, and I went to the hospital, I left the pie crusts and rolls I had mixed up that morning on the kitchen table along with the dress pattern I had bought for my new niece. It had been months since I had felt this energetic, and so that morning I had begun a few projects while I waited for our sixth child to be born. The telephone awakened me from my after-lunch nap; the pediatrician wanted to see me in his office to discuss Abby’s blood test results. 

Religion and Suicide: A Records-Linkage Study

Since the early studies of the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, suicide has interested sociologists. But suicide, by its very nature, has resisted study, and the problem of studying it has not eased over the years.…

Four Characteristics of the Mormon Family: Contemporary Research on Chastity, Conjugality, Children, and Chauvinism

From its inception, Mormonism has been characterized by a blend of traditional American culture mixed with unique, sometimes even radical, elements. The nineteenth-century Mormon family combined aspects of Puritan family morality with a unique theology…

To Watch a Daughter Die

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Three Poems for My Mother

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Grandpa’s Coffee

It is a morning flight. We have gained altitude and are somewhere over the Colorado Rockies. Below, through breaks in the clouds, a thin film of early snowfall covers the mountaintops like a veil. High…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: East Meets West

I have enthusiastically accepted the invitation to share my experiences as a “cultural Jew” married to a “cultural Mormon.” Kenneth and I have been married almost twenty-three years. I have lived in Salt Lake City since 1971 and before that for nine months when we were first married. 

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Through a Stained-Glass Window

Let me start by saying that I did not pick the title for this panel —I am not yet convinced that I have survived the experience intact. How ever, after more than fifteen years of…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: “To Celebrate the Marriage Feast Which Has No End”

Friends often ask me what it is like to be an active Lutheran layperson married to an active Latter-day Saint. I think I can best describe my marriage experience by addressing my comments to my…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Introductory Remarks

Members of other religions, or persons with no religious affiliation, take on special challenges when they marry Latter-day Saints. In addition to the same problems any inter-faith marriage might encounter—conflicts over church attendance, child-rearing, value…

Heart of the Fathers

The Child is father to the Man  Wordsworth You wake before the alarm you’d set for 4:30. You dress, almost ritually, and decide to fast. Today of all days you must maintain the proper mood—and…

Confessions of a Utah Gambler

The old hometown, Ogden, Utah, has long been an overlooked sports town. That is, if you take the adjective overlooked in an underground or an underworld sense, and if you broaden “sporting men” to include…

Rhythms

My father’s heart is strong and scarred, bound in spots by thread, a delicate patchwork of veiny fabrics. I imagine, when I talk to him on the telephone, his physical presence. I can hear his…

Why Am I Here?

I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”

For Meg — With Doubt and Faith

In times of drought, it is hard to remember times of flood. After yet another California winter without sufficient water, we take quick showers, rarely flush the toilet, let our lawn grow long to hide…

Hallelujah?

Fatherless Child

A Jew Among Mormons

Demographics of the Contemporary Mormon Family

Who We Are, Where We Come From

Blessing the Dog

He waited, but the dog didn’t come.  He went back into the house. His wife was strapping on her brassiere, skin spilling over where the strap was tight.  “Seen the dog?” he said.  “Haen’t my…

If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.

“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology

Sparrow Hunter

On Meditation

Brother Melrose

The old man walked out from under the line of high, heavy trees bordering the cemetery. He stopped. He looked up, blinking his eyes. He held his hands palms up to the fading April sunlight.…

Measures of Music

It came then that Sara dreamed of the flood. It had been the news for weeks, cities all along the Front sandbagging streets, sidewalks, driveways, window wells, a mudslide that made a lake over a…

Elijah’s Calling: 1840-41 (from This Could Be the Dawning of That Day)

The following chapter is excerpted from One More River to Cross, the title of the first novel of a trilogy to be called Standing on the Promises being published by Deseret Book beginning in August…

There is Always Someplace Else (From There is Always Someplace Else)

In 1957, a year and a half before she married the man who would leave her, Kören Dixon was almost the Carnival Queen of Conjuring Creek. There were only three nominations for the job, and…

Down on Batlle’s Farm

Gay and Lesbian Mormons: Interviews with James Kent, Former Executive Director of Affirmation, and with Aaron Cloward, Founder and Coordinator of Gay LDS Youth

Dialogue 33.3 (Fall 2000): 123–136
Hugo Oliaz intervews two important figures in LDS LGBTQ organzing, a former diretor of Affirmation and the founder of Gay LDS Youth, a group that briefly flourished in the early 2000s. A great resource for learning more about LDS LGBTQ organizing in this period. 

The Truth, the Partial Truth, Something Like the Truth, So Help Me God

Philosophical Christian Apology Meets “Rational” Mormon Theology

On “Defense of Marriage” A Reply to Quinn

In a reply to Quinn’s article in the same issue, Armand Mauss questioned whether the church was motivated by homophobia or a more benevolent force.

Prelude to the National “”Defense of Marriage”” Campaign: Civil Discrimination Against Feared or Despised Minorities

This is an early 50+ page article documenting LDS political activity in the 1990s on same-sex marriage, culminating in Prop 22. Quinn’s explanation was that homophobia provided the best explanation for LDS prejudice against same-sex…

David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the Foundation for the 1978 Revelation

A Voice from the Land of Zion: Elder Erastus Snow in Denmark 1850 to 1852

The Danish Genesis of Virginia Sorensen’s Lotte’s Locket

Eggertsen Men: Male Family Influences in Virginia Sorensen’s Kingdom Come and the Evening and the Morning

History, Memory and Imagination in Virginia Eggertsen Sorensen’s Kingdom Come

Keepsakes

On the day of her funeral, my mother’s two sister-wives put on a dinner in her honor. Sister Karen and Sister Sharlene spent the morning before the services baking pies and fresh bread, making potato…

Grandpa and the Petrified Oysters

Whenever I visited my grandparents, I always knew where to check for Granddad. As a means of escaping household routine, he maintained a remote kingdom, a long shed deep in the interior of the backyard…

Our Big Fat Temple Weddings: Who’s In, Who’s Out, and How We Get Together

Belonging

Mind, Body, and the Boundary Waters

Grandpa’s Visit

Cemetery Life

Scenes from the Movie

Plinka, Plinka, Plinka

What You Don’t Know

The Homecoming

Elder Jeff Lee Johnson came home on January 24 at 2:14 in the afternoon. The plane had made its way north all that day, stopping in Miami, then Atlanta before finally arriving six minutes ahead…

Toward a “”Marriage Group”” of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories

Thanksgiving

Beth: Listening  “Take care,” says my Grandma Tess. She is the first one to leave after Thanksgiving dinner because she can’t drive at night. She’s got two hours’ driving to do, south to Salt Lake.…

Brown

I’m mostly brown. I have brown hair and, in summer, brown skin. It’s not a pretty golden brown like the models in the tanning lotion ads. It’s a kind of ashy, dirty brown. My eyes…

Miracle

Lucille Wentworth sat in her working on her cross-stitch, watching Judy and Ray hold hands, sitting across from her on the couch. It was late, past one; they’d talked for hours, the conversation flowing around…

’Atta Boy

Latham Runyon wondered what time he ought to close his window. It was going to be a tongue-hanger today. But for now, the morning was still dewy and bearable.  He pulled his half-glasses up to…

Homecomings

At Eastside School in Idaho Falls, they gave us a full hour for lunch; and like most of the kids, I went home each day. Mom always had my lunch ready. I’d gulp it down…

White Shell

There are pieces of white shell sifted with the sands and soils of Dinetah that confuse newcomers and outsiders. Tourists look at the shells like puzzle pieces, trying to force them into what they know.…

Heloise and Abelard

“We’ll get there by ten.” Nod and look behind, dance a quickstep ahead of the noise of a thousand feet on the wet pavement of Liege. Feels strange to be thrown into a world you’re…

En Route: A Journey of the Spirit

Sister Love

“You’re acting like a child,” said Karen.  “I’m not,” said Lynn, and looked with determination at her dinner plate. She could feel Karen’s anger vibrating against her skin. “Oh, don’t talk to me—”  Lynn glanced…

Follow Me, Boys

The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…

Frau Ruster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance

Depression and the Brethren of the Priesthood

Seeds of Faith in City Soil: Growing Up Mormon in New York City

The Blessing

You never can tell what April is going to be like in Boise. Sometimes you get sunshine, sometimes you get rain, and sometimes you get blizzards that roar out of the canyons. I died in…

Entertaining Angels Unaware

Lucy hated arguing with her companion in public, even though they argued in English so most people couldn’t understand what they were saying, and those who did could probably care less. They didn’t argue often,…

The Beings I Love Are Creatures

A Visit for Tregan

Tregan Weaver was driving home from Madison High in his little black CRX on the first warm day of spring in Rexburg, Idaho. The trees along Main Street were in blossom, the lawns were turning…

Gentle Persuasions

I I often went with my father on home teaching visits when I was ten and eleven. I don’t remember why his companions were never around. I suppose they were inactive. Back then, inactivity wasn’t…

Buildings

May Many Phoenixes Rise

A Deep Reverence in My Heart; Part of Our Family

Looked like a Church, Sounded like a Church; How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

Move Back in a Heartbeat

The Bonds Endure; Freudian Analysis of Lehi’s Dream

Tribute to a Building; Giving Church a Try

Not Different from My Home

Equally Warm, Whether Empty or Full

Not the Building

An Anchor for Me

Matzoh for Sacrament

Ten Fictions about My Father

1  First he went down to Pappy’s pasture. The pasture was a strip of marshy land down the hill from our house, sandwiched by the inter state and train tracks where Pappy kept his cows.…

Hurt or Make Afraid

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, In His house full of light, Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; There the saints will shine bright.  William Clayton, 1846  I’m cold. We’ve been walking…

Fish Stories

Although it had never been formally declared or written in cursive on a piece of parchment, Jolene understood her place in the family hierarchy. She was right there between the ancient golden retriever and the…

That the Glory of God Might Be Manifest

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology

Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology”  was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times.⁠ To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article. 

Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Katy, My Sister

We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…