If you missed the live discussion of Sunstone’s special issue on Motherhood, the recording is now available. RadioActive host Troy Williams interviews guest editor Holly Welker, artist Galen Dara, contributing author Rachel Mabey Whipple, and Sunstone executive director Mary Ellen Robertson. Check it out here: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/krcl/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1930379/RadioActive/RadioActive!.May.11.Heavenly.Mother%27s.Daypodcast
Category: Issue 166
Guest Editor’s Foreword: The Power of the Goddess
By Holly Welker Like the art? Click to visit our Cafe Press store. Anyone who has ever attended a sacrament meeting on Mother’s Day has heard motherhood celebrated as a source of joy and meaning. The more confusing, heartbreaking aspects of motherhood don’t always get the same attention over the pulpit—even though the suffering involved …
Transitioning
By Tiffany Singer In every way it was a typical baby shower: we played a few games, ate finger foods, and watched the mother open gifts. We admired a handmade baby quilt and cooed over adorable Baby Gap onesies, tiny booties, and the like. Eventually the planned activities gave way to chatter. I listened to …
Poem: Invocation
By Edward R. Snow May the weary, sighing for God’s embrace, feel themselves cradled in her arms. May those who desire to know their Mother and are not satisfied with less know joy. May those who give themselves away to know her dwell in Wisdom’s home. May those who desire her …
Poem: Standoff
By Judith Curtis She, perched on platforms, short silk dress stretched tight, the glimmer of a sneer, every inch of visible skin blaring her youth; the I-dare-you-to-say-anything arrows striking me dead on. I glare back at her, this inverse self, this opposite of clone, this obstreperous kite battling the wind she needs to …
Equally Shared Parenting: Half the Work . . . All the Fun
By Chelsea Shields Strayer and Mike Strayer Eric, I need you to change the baby’s diaper,” Heidi said, attempting to give her husband the baby and a clean diaper she had picked up on her way to the living room. It was already 8 p.m., and she needed to get the three oldest kids ready …
Heavenly Motherhood: Silences, Disturbances, and Consolations
By Margaret Toscano Or download the audio file here: Heavenly Motherhood: Silences, Disturbances, and Consolations It was many years after I embraced feminism in the 1970s before I felt drawn to the Heavenly Mother, before I felt any emotional connection to even the idea of her. Priesthood first stirred my desire, a desire …
Guest Editor’s Afterword: In Our Prayers and In Our Lives
By Holly Welker One reason Robert A. Rees’s call for a feminist Mormon midrash is so important is that it can help us create a more nourishing, expansive idea of Heavenly Mother. As the essays from Janice Allred and Margaret Toscano make clear, she is presently a source of at least as much discord and …
A Testimony Birthed of Pain and Hope
By Rachel Mabey Whipple Just past the seven-month mark of my first pregnancy, I was diagnosed with pregnancy-induced hypertension and put on bed rest—lying only on my side. Clint, my husband, was doing lab research to finish his undergraduate degree, earning a paycheck as a short-order cook, and traveling to interview at different graduate schools. …
Poem: Harrow
By Anita Tanner After the plow’s deep churning comes the spreading work, roots and remnants of years’ crops turned over in the soil. Harrow spikes and teeth begin the fine thin line of mud-caked script read and reread every year until time slows for each foot to meet the corrugated stair of the last …