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If you attended Sunstone Northwest 2010 in Bellevue, WA and/or Portland, OR, we’d like to hear from you! Please let us know what you thought of our symposium events in the Northwest by completing a quick 10-question survey. We look forward to hearing what you thought about the sessions, topics, and what we can do …
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 …
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. …
During a sabbatical in Germany, our good friend Petra invited my wife and me to make cookies at her home. As we waited for the Vanillekipferl to cool, I noticed a sign on her wall, a “gift” from her grown children. It read, “Be nice to your kids so they will choose a good nursing …
Just when we thought we’d talked enough about disappointing Mormon men, George A. Smith pulls us back in. In this unflinching episode, we unpack how the so-called “Father of Southern Utah” helped lay the groundwork for one of the darkest moments in LDS history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. With a wig in one hand and …
I grew up moving from country to country, embassy to embassy, but during my nomadic childhood I clung strongly to my identity as a Utahn, Mormon, and American. I tried to be “in the world, but not of it,” listening obsessively to Michael McLean tapes and reading Charly. But in 1997, when I graduated from …
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, …
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 …
Above the resurrected beings is deity. And this is one place where Sunstone readers made their views known. Sunstone reprinted this comic in 1989 from the Wittenberg Door, a magazine of Christian satire. According to editor Elbert Peck, Sunstone received a barrage of complaints about this cartoon—though none of them got into the letters to …