Last spring, I woke up in a hostel in Madrid, Spain, suddenly certain, forty pages of certain. In a rush, my twenty-five-year-old unpublished novel, written before my conversion to Mormonism, became Mormon literature. I think. What qualifies as that, exactly? Can a mystic’s work join in? Can a novel written from a convert’s point of …
Event: Salt Lake Symposium 2004
THE POETRY BUG BITES, EARLY AND LATE
That ticklish sensation can be a thrill or an irritation. An inflammation of the senses, it reveals itself as a subtle pleasure, or as a demand to scratch the itch. Once bitten, however, the urge is in the bloodstream. The young poets here write directly from a fresh inoculation of passion and introspection. The panel’s …
ANGELS IN AMERICA REVISITED
Set during the Reagan era at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America incorporates Mormonism’s sacred history into a symbolic universe that includes angelic visitations, prophetic callings, and seer stones. Ten years after the play was first staged, a six-hour, 60 million HBO production with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma …
FILM. VOICES IN EXILE: STORIES OF LESBIAN MORMONS
The 49-minute documentary, Voices in Exile, introduces viewers to eight lesbian Mormons as they tell about their experiences in the faith. These women know the LDS culture and have lived the life, they can sing the songs from Primary, they served missions, they held Church callings, they married in the temple, and they raised children. …
‘CREATIVE’ SUBSTANCE ABUSE IN LDS POPULATIONS
If practicing Mormons eschew alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs, do they use other sub-stances, abuse prescribed drugs, or engage in behavioral addictions? What cultural attitudes, pressures, or beliefs might contribute to self-medicating behaviors and addictions? Mental health professionals describe some of the ‘creative” drugs of choice used in LDS populations and the cultural beliefs employed …
SURRENDERING GODS AND HEROES
Leaving the Church was not an easy journey for which to pack; Mormonism had been my sole spiritual home. I wondered what to take, what to leave behind. Should I slip away quietly in the night, or light fireworks; go it alone, or drag someone with me; ask politely to be excused, or raise the …
TRUTH OR FICTION? READING THE DA VINCI CODE
Last year, The Da Vinci Code swept other books aside in sales as well as cultural impact. The plot consumed readers while its esoteric information piqued widespread curiosity and its religious themes struck a universal nerve, the divine feminine hidden in history, art, and culture emerging from obscurity. The book asserts that Leonardo Da Vinci …
NEPHI AND ME: PERSONAL JOURNEYS WITH THE BOOK OF MORMON
Book of Mormon studies have broken open in recent decades, leading to many new, and widely different, theories about its historicity, origins, theology, and function. But despite this flurry of activity among scholars, apologists, and revisionists, until recent publicity over DNA studies and the Church’s response caught their attention, very few Latter-day Saints had really …
MICHAEL MOORE’S FAHRENHEIT 9/11: HEAT OR LIGHT?
Part documentary, part mockumentary, part passionate political witness, part uproarious entertainment, this surprisingly commercially successful film criticizing the Bush administration’s response to the World Trade Center attack; the president’s launch and conduct of the Iraq war; the Patriot Act, and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal has provoked national debate. Meanwhile, two Mormons, Bush administration lawyer …
PILLARS OF MY FAITH
This is Sunstone’s perennially best-attended session. Here speakers share the events and concepts that animate their religious lives; a little soul-baring, a little spiritual journey, a little intellectual testimony-bearing. This self-reflective night is about the things that matter most, plus spirited congregational hymn-singing. Jody England Hansen, John Sillito, Terri Buhler