When Matt was young, we often read Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories together. His head would rest against my arm as he followed these simple but wise stories about the difficulties and joys of relating with a loved one. I thought the stories were only for him, but many years later I found out that they …
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us — We can find no scar, But internal difference — Where the Meanings, are — —Emily Dickinson Photographing babies in the morgue, filming a dying young man, dressing a corpse, giving the sacrament to an old woman in a nursing home, watching …
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 …
Sunstone has been around for long enough that you can uncover various technological eras by going through our basement and attic. For example, this strange machine that could send documents over telephone wires. Amazing, huh? And you could store up to 1.3 megabytes worth of information on this small square. As you can see, Michael …
Looking for yet another binge-watch time sink? If you haven’t gotten to The Good Place yet, go there. Among the many joys of the afterlife-themed sitcom are the pause-or-you’ll-miss-’em restaurant names like “Ponzu Scheme” and “Biscotti Pippen” and “(Everything) on a Stick.” Which begs the question: What if Kristen Bell and Ted Danson were in …
Part X of the Sunstone Classics series. D. Michael Quinn was the author of such classic books of Mormon history as Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview and The Mormon Hierarchy series. He was excommunicated in September 1993, thus becoming a member of the September Six. This is excerpted from a Sunstone article published in …
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 …
I was really surprised to be asked to talk about why I stay because in some ways I feel like I don’t stay. I mean, I go to church every Sunday. I sit with my husband. I’ll sing in the ward choir, although I am not talented. I can be part of a chorus; just …
So, for our first 100 years, Mormons wanted all the ground to be stable. We might think of the Nauvoo Mormons draining the swamp so that they could have solid ground to build their houses on. We can also think of them trekking across the prairie to get to Salt Lake City where they could …
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. …
