Seeking a Truce with the Mormon Deity: Remaking Myself as a Mormon during the Early 1980s The protagonist of my story, ‘The Canyons of Grace,” published in 1982, symbolically kills the Christian God and steps forward into a mortal world full of wild grace. The price of traditional faith, she says, is your integrity. The story was, I feared at the time of its publication, an allegory representing my own career. However, the reception by the liberal Mormon community of that story and of my other writings and presentations of the early 1980’s proved it to be otherwise. After decades of feeling spiritually alienated from my Christian heritage, I found myself feeling at one with it. I could now conceive of myself not only an observer of, but an actor within, the larger Mormon community.

Levi Peterson, Neal Chandler