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, …
The Mormonator and Me
One Sunday morning, about eight months into the pandemic, I hit full middle-aged dad mode. Time may have warped and shifted around the virus, but it also marched on. The first hint of my change was waking up one day to realize that all my clothes were from Costco. I also rediscovered baseball and became …
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 …
There Is U-235 in My Soul Today
In early 1951 the U.S. government began testing atomic bombs on Frenchman Flat, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and about 90 miles northwest of the U.S. Bureau of Mines station in Boulder City, where we lived and where my metallurgist father researched uranium. This is why, very early one morning, my brothers and …
Sunstone 50-year Time Capsule: Part VIII
Publishers wanted to get into the pocketbooks of Sunstone readers as well. Soon we started receiving ads from Bookcraft who hit our audience exactly with books by Eugene England and Truman Madsen. But then someone must have exercised unrighteous dominion and lost his priesthood because their next offering tried to get us on the Boyd …
Restaurants in the Mormon “Good Place” Part I
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 …
Confessions of An Aging Hypocritical Ex-Missionary
Part VIII of the Sunstone Classics Series Wayne C. Booth was a distinguished literary critic, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, and a professor of English and literature at the University of Chicago. This excerpt is from a Sunstone article published in 1998. It starts on page 25 of issue 109. Where am I …
Walking Into the Forest
During my early years, our family lived where there were few to no members of the Mormon Church. So my siblings and I attended services conducted by my father in our living room, my mother playing the piano and teaching us Primary songs. When I was eight years old, my geologist father, who believed deeply …
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.
A History of Sunstone Cartoons—Part VIII
Then something happened. Thirty years after the Sunstone readers rejected the “First Temptation of Christ” comic, and 20 years after Ed Snow wrote his “10 Commandments of Mormon Humor,” which explicitly forbade Sunstone from using deity in humor, Sunstone published a short story called “Jesus Christ (Almost) Visits the Mormons.” Now, this wasn’t a cartoon, …