As a non-Mormon scholar, John G. Turner spent years researching Joseph Smith’s life as he wrote a biography of Smith. He found out that nothing about Joseph Smith’s life was boring; for better or for worse. In this episode, Turner compares the young Joseph Smith as he produced the golden plates with the older Joseph …
Episode 158: Dan Neal on Polygamy, Murder and Mayhem in Idaho
When family secrets meet frontier justice: A murder that shattered a Mormon community Join Lindsay Hansen Park and journalist Daniel H. Neal for a conversation about his new book No Forgiveness—a true crime story that’s part family reckoning, part historical excavation. On a summer morning in 1911, two polygamous Mormon neighbors stood in an Idaho …
Episode 157: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 5
The story shifts from tension to bloodshed. September 1857, Mountain Meadows, southern Utah where a wagon train of emigrant families was betrayed under a flag of truce and massacred by Mormon settlers and their allies. In this episode, we unravel the deception, the chain of command, and the sacred language that cloaked an atrocity in …
E206: How Sunstone Cartoons Saved the LDS Church from Itself.
Is it blasphemous to publish a cartoon about Angel Moroni? How about Jesus? How about God? Sunstone has been exploring the limits of what LDS culture is willing to laugh at for decades. Using many hilarious (and possibly blasphemous) examples, Stephen Carter talks about the times when Sunstone ran afoul of sacred sensibilities, and also …
Episode 156: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 4
In September 1857, southern Utah became the stage for one of the darkest tragedies in American frontier history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This was no spontaneous clash but a calculated act of religious extremism and territorial paranoia that left 120 emigrants from the Baker-Fancher party dead, while Mormon leaders shifted blame onto Southern Paiute tribes. …
Episode 155: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 3
Just when we thought we’d talked enough about disappointing Mormon men, George A. Smith pulls us back in. In this unflinching episode, we unpack how the so-called “Father of Southern Utah” helped lay the groundwork for one of the darkest moments in LDS history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. With a wig in one hand and …
E205: Perfectionism: Mormon Style.
Is your life a sermon? Do you imagine your every action being narrated by a general authority? In this episode, Stephen Carter dives into perfectionism, showing how it manifests in people’s lives, and proposing a few odd ways to escape it. (Hint: Not through fasting and prayer.)
Episode 154: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 2
In Part Two of “The Summer of Conspiracy,” we follow Apostle George A. Smith on his fateful southern tour, an incendiary road trip of sermons, war councils, and covert diplomacy that would ignite the powder keg of Mountain Meadows. As Smith carries Brigham Young’s orders through the frontier, we trace how military drills, apocalyptic sermons, …
Episode 153: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 1
In our most incendiary episode yet, “The Summer of Conspiracy” rips open the shocking truth of how Mormon leaders, consumed by apocalyptic terror and drunk on prophetic power, weaponized an entire territory in the blood-soaked summer of 1857. When the federal government came knocking, Brigham Young and his zealot lieutenants didn’t just declare war, they …
E204: The Saddest Book in the World: How Filmmaker David Lynch Revised My View of the Book of Mormon
Jesus, Mormon, and David Lynch walk into Stephen Carter’s head. Together, they manage to revise everything Stephen thought he knew about the Book of Mormon, the Atonement, and Eraserhead.