Awards
Lists of Brodie award winners:
X-Mormon of the Year 2012: David Twede
X-Mormon of the Year 2011: Joanna Brooks
X-Mormon of the Year 2010: Monica Bielanko
X-Mormon of the Year 2009: Walter Kirn
A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.
Rituals & Celebrations
I have a complicated relationship with holidays, one that predates my abandonment of religious belief. I have a hard time understanding rituals; I need to understand the logic underlying the holidays. The link between Christmas trees, gifts, and the birth of Jesus always seemed too tenuous for credibility. In graduate school, when I was lost and confused about a career, I took the Meyers-Briggs personality test. When I received my results, I laughed – part of the profile stated “does Read more [...]
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Book Review: Book Of Mormon Girl
In the first chapter of her book, Joanna Brooks writes “I grew up in a world where all the stories I heard arrive at the same conclusions: the wayfarer restored, the sick healed, the lost keys found, a singular truth confirmed. And an orthodox Mormon story is the only kind of story I ever wanted to tell. But these are not the kinds of story life has given me.” I bought this book because I was curious. My life story Read more [...]
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Book Review: Sweet Land Of Bigamy
Miah Arnold, the author of “Sweet Land Of Bigamy” is not an ex-Mormon but rather the descendants of ex-Mormons. Her great-great-grandmother was a second wife, disowned by her husband when Utah became a state. And so Miah grew up in rural Utah, in a home attached to the Three-Legged Dog Saloon. The protagonist of “Sweet Land Of Bigamy” is a woman by the name of Helen Motes. Helen is, above all, a survivor. Fatherless and with an alcoholic mother, Helen lived a fractured, Read more [...]
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On Having An Article Published In Salon
A few days ago, I was contacted by the editor of Salon – he wanted to know if he could use my story about attempting to resign from the Mormon Church for Salon’s main page. I said yes, typing out a reply as quickly as my fingers could manage. But then the doubts began to creep in. He wanted to use my real name. To date, I have been using the online name postmormongirl. Was I ready to go public with my identity? I told the editor to use the name Rachel Velamur, which is only a slight stretching of Read more [...]
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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Fourth Of July Edition
postmormongirl here, filling in for chanson as she prepares to go to the Sunstone convention. It was a good week in Outer Blogness with a lot of very spirited and varied conversations. There was quite a lot going on today in Outer Blogness this week, some of which hit the mainstream. One of the big stories was a NY-Times article The Mormon Lens On American History. In light of all the apologetic dustup, I am really glad to see that outsiders are starting to take interest in the subject of Mormon Read more [...]
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A Frugal Education
I am a rare specimen; I am a person that graduated from college without receiving financial assistance from my parents and without taking out student loans. When my classmates were taking out loans to afford on-campus housing and meal plans, I was living in the sketchier area of town, wearing thrift-store clothing, and getting creative about locating free food on campus. I attended Cornell University, where my frugality was outside the norm. Most of my classmates were either from the upper middle Read more [...]
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Sunday in Outer Blogness: SLC Gay Pride Parade Edition!
So the big topic of the week was the SLC Gay Pride Parade, which happened last Sunday. The big news-line was a group of 300 active LDS members that chose to skip church and march in the parade. Outerblogness this week was full of accounts of the parade, as well as photos. There was also a fun poem about Jesus in drag. As you can imagine, this has left a lot of people with mixed feelings. For some, this has helped heal, for others, there were reservations concerning the motivations of LDS Inc. Read more [...]
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Brother Selected For The “I’m A Mormon” Campaign
A couple months ago, the Mormon church decided to profile my brother for their Im A Mormon campaign. A camera crew came to his house for an interview; now his profile and testimony are listed on the www.mormon.org website. My brother was thrilled about the opportunity — he saw the honor as a mark of respect for his status as a member. I find myself feeling very uneasy about the matter. At this point, I need to clarify. My brother is black. He was born in 1978, the same year that the Read more [...]
Posted in And I'm a Mormon, discrimination, Family, mormon.org, Uncategorized
A Child And The Big Scary Apostate
As a kid, most of the General Conference talks didnt make much of an impression on me. I was sitting in the pews listening, but I was also a kid with a short attention span. Beyond feeling a sense of reverence for the guys on the screen, most of the talks went in one ear and out the other. But there was one exception. One year, I heard a talk about people who leave the church. The speaker described people who left as being led astray by Satan, fallen into the depths of immorality. Read more [...]
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