As a kid growing up in New York City, I was blessed to have safe spaces that offered me emotional and spiritual havens from the tumult of the city streets and my parents’ marriage. The church building, located just a few blocks from my apartment and now the Manhattan temple, was the most important of those spaces. Some of my earliest memories of church involve watching Homefront television spots in the Visitors’ Center (now clothing rental, I think?). In high... Read more
Metaphors are an inexact science. But sometimes they can capture feelings and anxieties in a way that scientific language rarely can. Perhaps that is why scriptural texts are filled with metaphoric language: the body of Christ, the stone cut from the mountain, the living waters. In the revelation designated as the “preface” to the Doctrine and Covenants, it is declared that the Church is not only “true”—a description over which many religions have battled—but also that it is “living.” The... Read more
In piecing together the sobering events over the last week, one of the most common interpretations I’ve seen is one offered by Dehlin and Kelly themselves and echoed over much of social media: that these disciplinary actions are intended to repress or punish questions and conversations. In the recent Trib interview with John Dehlin and Kate Kelly, Dehlin argued that the situation signals the Church is “trying to stem the tide of Mormons asking hard questions and struggling”; in Kelly’s... Read more
Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Public Square 2014 Summer Series: Conversations on Religious Trends. Read other perspectives from the Mormon community here. I am neither a Mormon Stories fan nor an advocate of ordaining women, so I write this column with some trepidation. No matter how hard I try to be sympathetic, some people will inevitably find me judgmental or condescending; try as I might to understand, some people will conclude that I have distorted their opinions to make mine... Read more
Kate Kelly is not my favorite Mormon feminist, and Ordain Women is a movement I’ve never agreed with. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to make it clear that I’m in a different feminist camp. But the news that the Ordain Women founder Kate Kelly would soon face a disciplinary council for apostasy and possibly be excommunicated – all in absentia since she moved across the country before receiving the news – struck a chord with me. It reawakened... Read more
From a hillside in Missouri, one can look out upon a relatively nondescript valley verdant with seasonal crops. It is to here, it is said, that Adam and Eve fled upon expulsion from the Garden of Eden and offered prayer to God and it is to here, it is said, that Adam will gather his posterity at the last day. Adam-ondi-Ahman, as Joseph Smith called the valley, is a locus of human-divine communication and visitation in Mormon theo-history. There is,... Read more
On June 2, the University of Illinois Press released my first book, Kirtland Temple: The Biography of Shared Mormon Sacred Space. For my post this month, I thought that I would give the readers a small sampling of my new work. While most of my book covers the Kirtland Temple in the twentieth century, the following excerpt is drawn from my first chapter that narrates the emergence and uses of the temple in the 1830s and 40s. This excerpt pays... Read more
Written on Memorial Day, 2014 This is my first Memorial Day home after combat. In Afghanistan, I prayed over the injured, the dying, and the dead—and I suppose it’s fitting to pray for all of them again, today. I’m not as haunted by the dead as I am by these words, which I often heard when a casualty came in and a Marine or Sailor would respond, “Don’t worry, Chaps: it’s only an Afghan.” I suppose the moral... Read more
Since Blake Ostler’s landmark article appeared in Dialogue in 1987, there’s been something of a trend among believing Mormon intellectuals. Increasingly, the tendency is to account for the English text of the Book of Mormon by positing a kind of weave of several agents operative in the production of the Book of Mormon—one of them divine (God, in some form), one of them human but ancient (the original authors of the book), and one of them human but modern (Joseph... Read more
[Image courtesy of the Liahona Children’s Foundation] “The Church may or may not be true,” quipped my father-in-law, who was at the time serving as a stake president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “But it is organized.” Born of the theological basis of hierarchical priesthood authority and of the practical exigencies of running a worldwide church with mostly volunteer labor, Mormon organization is indeed a force to be reckoned with. When the Church organizational machinery... Read more
Peculiar People
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