“Art is a wound turned into light.” ~ Georges Braque This presentation will explore how art, personal expression, and narrative therapy can be used as a modality for healing from trauma.
Event: Salt Lake Symposium 2020
Entheogens in Occult Traditions and the Visionary World of First Nephi
Post-enlightenment magic and occult grimoires and handbooks seamlessly blend the spiritual and physical, often obscuring naturalistic mechanisms to achieve incantations, spells, hexes, or conjurations. The Book of Mormon similarly blends the spiritual and physical to obscure the presence of entheogens to uninitiated readers. Early Mormon experiences suggest the use of hallucinogenic substances, common at the …
Transforming Our Grief-filled Mormon Experiences into Gratitude
Sometimes the difference between feeling grief or gratitude about our Mormon experience is our perspective. How do we perceive the meanings and consequences of our faith journey? How do we view our relationships with the various Mormons in our lives? In this session, we will draw from social psychology to identify some ways we can …
Ask the Truth and Transparency Foundation
The Truth & Transparency Foundation is responsible for revealing the pay rates of LDS General authorities, tying $32 billion to the LDS Church, and revealing the abuse that eventually led to the imprisonment of Sterling Van Wagenen. Come ask the founders anything.
Social Liberals, Church Patriarchs, and Mormon Racial Dogma, 1945-1978
No issue caused the LDS Church more grief in the twentieth century than restricting people of black African origin from receiving priesthood ordination and temple rites. Following World War II there was an energetic movement to eliminate segregation and discrimination everywhere in the United States. LDS Church leaders stubbornly opposed this powerful movement in spite …
LDS Artists of Color: An Introduction
The future of Mormon art, like the future of the Mormon people, lies with its global, diverse, and multicultural population. This session highlights the work of five women of color whose work is transforming the landscape of Mormon visual art. All of these artists invite and challenge questions about culture and faith. View and shop …
Ethical Approaches to Scholarship about Vulnerable Communities
Cristina Rosetti will ask the question, “Who has the authority to speak on behalf of marginalized religious communities in Mormon Studies?” Lindsay Hansen Park will speak on the impact of research, advocacy, and scholarship on fundamentalist Mormon communities.”
Harnessing the Power of Vulnerability as a Spiritual Practice
Vulnerability has been an underappreciated and underutilized virtue in LDS culture. Through her research, Brené Brown has opened up a global conversation about the power of vulnerability in our personal and institutional lives. In this session, we will talk about how vulnerability could help the Church and its members live up to their Christian potential …
A Metaphorical Approach to “the Church is True”
After undergoing a typical LDS faith crisis, I reconstructed my LDS testimony using Marcus Borg’s metaphorical paradigm as a pattern. In other words, I readily acknowledged historical and scriptural problems, but chose to focus instead on the truth and beauty of lived experience. I’ll summarize the Borg’s paradigm, explain my perspective of the restored gospel, …
The Struggles & Successes of Mormon Arts
The ARCH-HIVE, a collective of eclectic Mormon artists, presents a panel on the struggles & successes of Mormon art in the past, present, and future. From the orthodox to the esoteric, the official to the underground, Mormon and Mormon-adjacent artists have used art of all forms to express their feelings on spirituality, the divine, and …