Part III of the Sunstone Classics series. Carol Lynn Pearson is the author of the best-selling memoir Goodbye, I Love You, and the multi-award-winning play Facing East (being re-staged by Plan-B Theater in October 2026 for its 20th anniversary). Sunstone published this reflection by her in issue 97 in 1994. As I perform my one-woman …
By Dayna Patterson Dayna Patterson is a writer, editor, textile artist, macro photographer, amateur fungophile, and Thea-curious recovering Mormon. Find her at daynapatterson.com. As the camera zooms out to capture the last scene—a paved road winding through Switzerland’s rolling green—I feel myself about to break. We’re sitting on the bed in pajamas, me and my …
Review Essay by Stephen Carter Stephen Carter is the director of publications for the Sunstone Education Foundation. What is it that bothers mainstream Mormons about polygamy? Carol Lynn Pearson asked this question in a 2014 online survey and received more than 8,000 responses, 51 percent of them from active Mormons. Often the respondents …
By Carol Lynn Pearson I wrote a little poem, and often I found myself reading it over the phone to women who called me needing to share a heavy burden. LABOR You have come in Like a wounded animal That crawls into a log To die. Now Do not think me Unfeeling. It’s just that …
by Stephen Carter WHAT IS IT that bothers mainstream Mormons about polygamy? Carol Lynn Pearson asked this question in a 2014 online survey and received more than 8,000 responses, 51 percent of them from active Mormons. Often the respondents left stories of their own encounters with polygamy in an answer box at the end of …
By Carol Lynn Pearson YEARS AGO WHEN my husband Gerald and I made the outrageous decision to self-publish my poems, I wrote this simple piece that became the title poem of one of the books: A WIDENING VIEW When my eye first opened Behind the viewfinder, There, in closeup, Was a flower— The only …
By Michael Farnworth The previous issue’s Family Forum explored parenting from the perspective of moral theorist Lawrence Kohlberg. His research argues that we initially base our motivations to be moral on fear that something bad with happen to us if we don’t obey the rules, but then we move on to behaving in order to …
By Michael Farnworth Law and Love in the Family Obedience is the first law of heaven. The way we interpret this aphorism—one of the most famous in Mormonism—says a lot about our parenting style. The aphorism is based on D&C 130:20–21: “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, …
Still on the Plains What a lovely surprise to see a short piece from No More Goodbyes printed as “An Olive Leaf” in issue 162. By way of synchronicity, the mail carrier who brought the magazine today took with him a copy of No More Goodbyes that I had signed and placed on my mailbox …
