I recently had the opportunity of corresponding with “Roger,” a successful Borderlands member. Following is an edited version of our email exchanges with names and details changed to protect identities. Initial Contact Message Hi, my name is Roger. I am a lifelong member of the LDS Church. I have read most of your Borderland columns …
Part IX of the Sunstone Classics series Lavina Fielding Anderson was a prolific editor who had a huge impact on LDS journal articles and books over many decades. She was also an extraordinary writer. She was excommunicated in September 1993 for her work on the Mormon Alliance, thus becoming a member of the September Six. …
Part VIII of the Sunstone Classics Series Wayne C. Booth was a distinguished literary critic, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, and a professor of English and literature at the University of Chicago. This excerpt is from a Sunstone article published in 1998. It starts on page 25 of issue 109. Where am I …
In a surprising turn, the LDS Church has quietly validated the long-disputed 1886 Revelation given to John Taylor, a document that fundamentalists have clung to for over a century as divine proof that plural marriage was never meant to end. In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan dig into the origins of the revelation, the secret …
A few months ago, I started to realize how just long it had been since I first began on what we now call a faith journey. I started in college, which means that I have been going for more than twenty-five years. That realization brought a bunch of questions to mind. What’s come of all …
Part IV of the Sunstone Classics Series Linda Sillitoe was a reporter for the Deseret News, co-author of Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders, and author of many novels and poetry collections. This piece is excerpted from a Sunstone article published in 1990. It starts on page 12 of issue 80. [Beginning in …
In August 2016, our family moved to Belgium for a year-long sabbatical. We had already participated in the Utah primary caucuses, and we used an overseas ballot to send in our vote well in advance of Election Day. We are eight hours ahead of Utah, so when we woke up on the morning of 9 …
I will never forget the moment when I knew he had won. The look on my wife’s face. 8 November 2016. I had driven up to Salt Lake to see a play about Joe Hill, the labor organizer, and his preposterously biased trial and conviction (and eventual execution) in a Utah court. My wife said …
Some of the things I found in Sunstone’s various closets were these short-lived Mormon publications. Including the infamous Seventh Street Press (started by future Sunstone and Signature Books leaders), which made nothing but trouble on BYU campus in the early 80s. (And, yes, it was THAT Packer speech this issue is reporting on. You …
So, the next step up is, do we publish humor about founding leaders? For example, this cartoon about why Martin Harris was Joseph’s scribe only briefly. This is one of the very few cartoons I could find about Joseph Smith published in Sunstone. It seems that, for the most part, we stayed away from pictorial …
