I didn’t leave the COJCOLDS because I felt deceived when I learned the truth about church history. For one thing, I grew up knowing a lot about church history because it was also my family history. When I was little, we used to go to family reunions for all the…
Author: Holly
Mormon Stories and John Dehlin’s Mystery Cycle
Over the past five years or so, I’ve tried every so often to track down a particular conversation here at MSP about one of John Dehlin’s failures to tamp down a crisis he created for himself. Something about it nagged at me, and I wanted to review it. I was…
God the Monster
This summer, when I posted on X about my lifelong conviction that the god of Mormonism is a moral monster, someone told me, very helpfully and completely accurately, that I would love God’s Monsters by Esther Hamori. God’s Monsters is the first work of religious scholarship that has made me…
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Is This What Joseph Smith Really Looked Like?
A daguerreotype has been found that may well be an image of Joseph Smith. Joseph was 38 years old when he died; I suppose the photo looks like someone about that age, if they’d had a hard life. The man in the photo doesn’t look all that charismatic or appealing…
When You’re Selling Nineteenth-Century Heteronormativity and Kids Today Aren’t Buying It
Remember back in 2021 when the COJCOLDS canceled the Saturday night gender-specific session of conference? Yeah, me neither, because I almost never pay attention to conference anymore. For some reason, though, in March the church announced the addition of a hastily arranged Saturday night Young Women’s session of General Conference…
The Brethren Want Us to Shut Up About Heavenly Mother Already, Again
Discussions are proliferating among liberal Mormons on social media about recent efforts by the Brethren to let the Saints know that they better stop talking about Heavenly Mother, ASAP. Here’s a good early summation of what’s going on, from Twitter. In 1985, when I was a missionary, a relative sent…
The Priesthood Is Magic
In 2010, as part of a panel at Sunstone called “Men and the Priesthood: Taking on the Feminine,” I presented a paper called “The Priesthood Is Magic” that I have been reminded of because of the uproar over Brad Wilcox’s dreadful talk to youth. The panel was the idea of…
Brad Wilcox, Racism, Misogyny, and the Assertion of Authority
In case you haven’t heard, Bradley R. Wilcox, second counselor in the Young Men General Presidency and BYU professor, has been widely castigated for offensive remarks he made at a multi-stake youth fireside in Alpine, Utah, on February 6. The uproar over Wilcox’s talk is so severe that I actually…
Bob Frankenstein and the threat to the church from its right
In the 1980s, three Mormon men “exercised unrighteous dominion” over me, which is a Mormon way of saying that they abused their authority to gratify their own egos and hurt someone else. Each of them did the same thing: they demanded that I sit in a room alone with them…
Latter-day Saint Leaders Can’t Understand Why Teenagers Have Trouble Converting People to Their Church
Although the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spent decades instructing their official teenage representatives to rush to challenge everyone they meet to be baptized, they are apparently baffled as to why their official teenage representatives have for decades rushed to challenge everyone they meet to…