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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 …
Mormons are a peculiar people. Look no further than the stories we tell. Every episode, we gather around one strange corner of Mormon history, folklore, conspiracy theory, or literature. One of us comes prepared to tell a story. The rest of us are typically hearing it for the first time. We listen, ask questions, make …
Once confined to institutional outlets and informal private spaces, Mormon discourse now unfolds across Instagram feeds, YouTube channels, TikTok videos, and reality television—platforms where belief, doubt, identity, and authority are publicly contested and negotiated. This panel explores how influencer culture is reshaping Mormon life, producing new forms of visibility, belonging, and contestation across the spectrum …
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, …
