As an Asian American Latter-day Saint feminist and scholar, she feels the urgency of the Lord's command that the Church be one (Doctrine and Covenants 38:27).With her unique mix of humor and candor, empathy and idealism, Inouye draws upon her academic training in Chinese history and religious studies, her rich cultural heritage, her experiences raising a family in an international setting, her tangle with cancer, and her resilient faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ to unfurl vibrant reflections on the enduring question of what it means to be a Latter-day Saint today.

    Since then, the church has been a significant player in the ongoing saga of LGBT rights within the United States and at times has carried decisive political clout.  Gregory Prince draws from over 50,000 pages of public records, private documents, and interview transcripts to capture the past half-century of the Mormon Church’s attitudes on homosexuality. Initially that principally involved only its own members, but with its entry into the Hawaiian political arena, the church signaled an intent to shape the outcome of the marriage equality battle. That involvement reached a peak in 2008 during California’s fight over Proposition 8, which many came to call the “Mormon Proposition.” In 2015, when the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land, the Mormon Church turned its attention inward, declaring same-sex couples “apostates” and denying their children access to key Mormon rites of passage, including the blessing (christening) of infants and the baptism of children.Prince's interview with KUER: https://radiowest.kuer.org/post/gay-r...Prince's Q-Talk with Equality Utah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcnVa...Prince's interview with the Press: https://conta.cc/2HHmeTmPrinces's event with Benchmark Books: https://youtu.be/Daz-TFldZDA

    It's the story of the story of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began. Joseph Smith, the church's founder, remembered that his first audible prayer, uttered in spring of 1820 when he was about fourteen, was answered with a vision of heavenly beings. Appearing to the boy in the woods near his parents' home in western New York State, they told Smith that he was forgiven and warned him that Christianity had gone astray.Smith created a rich and controversial historical record by narrating and documenting this event repeatedly. In First Vision, Steven C. Harper shows how Latter-day Saints (beginning with Joseph Smith) and others have remembered this experience and rendered it meaningful. When and why and how did Joseph Smith's first vision, as saints know the event, become their seminal story? What challenges did it face along the way? What changes did it undergo as a result? Can it possibly hold its privileged position against the tides of doubt and disbelief, memory studies, and source criticism-all in the information age? Steven C. Harper tells the story of how Latter-day Saints forgot and then remembered accounts of Smith's experience and how Smith's 1838 account was redacted and canonized. He explores the dissonance many saints experienced after discovering multiple accounts of Smith's experience. He describes how, for many, the dissonance has been resolved by a reshaped collective memory.

    Choices are presented as mutually exclusive and we are given little time to listen. You are either secular or religious. You either believe in the exclusive truth of your own religion or you believe truth is everywhere or impossible to discover. The battle over truth rages on. But what if truth were a child? With how much more care and humility would we speak and act if truth was not the result of some war of wills, but a flesh-and-bone living child, a living soul? Humanities scholar and Latter-day Saint George B. Handley charitably invites us to put away the false traditions of the fathers while seeking to lay hold of every good thing wherever it may be found in the world, thereby increasing our faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

    While never flinching from the realities of Latter-day Saint encroachment on Shoshone land and the racial ramifications of America’s spread westward, Parry offers messages of hope. As storyteller for his people, Parry brings the full weight of Shoshone wisdom to his tales—lessons of peace in the face of violence, of strength in the teeth of annihilation, of survival through change, and of the pliability necessary for cultural endurance. These are arresting stories told disarmingly well. What emerges from the margins of these stories is much more than a history of a massacre from the Shoshone perspective, it is a poignant meditation on the resilience of the soul of a people.--W. Paul Reeve, author of Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness

    The authors track its predecessors, describe its several components, and assess their theological significance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Four principalsections are discussed, along with attendant controversies associated with each. The Book of Moses purports to be a Mosaic narrative missing from the biblical version of Genesis. Too little treated in the scholarship on Mormonism, these chapters, produced only months after the Book of Mormon waspublished, actually contain the theological nucleus of Latter-day Saint doctrines as well as a virtual template for the Restoration Joseph Smith was to effect.In The Pearl of Greatest Price, the author covers three principal parts that are the focus of many of the controversies engulfing Mormonism today. These parts are The Book of Abraham, The Book of Moses, and The Joseph Smith History. Most controversial of all is the Book of Abraham, a production thatarose out of a group of papyri Smith acquired, along with four mummies, in 1835. Most of the papyri disappeared in the great Chicago Fire, but surviving fragments have been identified as Egyptian funerary documents. This has created one of the most serious challenges to Smith's prophetic claims theLDS church has faced. LDS scholars, however, have developed several frameworks for vindicating the inspiration of the resulting narrative and Smith's calling as a prophet. The author attempts to make sense of Smith's several, at times divergent, accounts of his First Vision, one of which iscanonized as scripture. He also assesses the creedal nature of Smith's Articles of Faith, in the context of his professed anti-creedalism. In sum, this study chronicles the volume's historical legacy and theological indispensability to the Latter-day Saint tradition, as well as the reasons for itsresilience and future prospects in the face of daunting challenges.

    His willingness to mix religion with extreme right-wing politics troubled many. Yet his fierce defense of the traditional family, unabashed love of country, and deep knowledge of the faith endeared him to millions. In Thunder from the Right, a group of veteran Mormon scholars probe aspects of Benson's extraordinary life. Topics include: how Benson's views influenced his actions as Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower Administration; his dedication to the conservative movement, from alliances with Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society to his condemnation of the civil rights movement as a communist front; how his concept of the principal of free agency became central to Mormon theology; his advocacy of traditional gender roles as a counterbalance to liberalism; and the events and implications of Benson's term as Church president. Contributors: Gary James Bergera, Matthew Bowman, Newell G. Bringhurst, Brian Q. Cannon, Robert A. Goldberg, Matthew L. Harris, J. B. Haws, and Andrea G. Radke-Moss

      Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.

    

    This work of love features the voices of established authors like Carol Lynn Pearson and Joanna Brooks, as well as first time poets and visual artists. It is designed to lend comfort and courage to those who feel unwanted by their religious community, and was written specifically for those facing excommunication from the Mormon church.

    I’ve read every one I could find, and this compelling volume is the best I’ve found. I like the vividness with which Terry lays out the day-to-day realities of missionary experience like a smorgasbord for those who haven’t yet tasted it, and even more appetizingly for those of us who thought we already had. I like the illumination of the book’s double-barreled perspective. The before-and-after portraits of the mature narrator looking back on Bruder Terry struggling through his missionary traumas and triumphs illuminate profound insights into the practical workings as well as the wonders of the missionary world. The themes of the book—the vicissitudes of personal revelation, the struggles to rescue fallen humanity (including one’s own), the girl-I-left-behind-me angst—are as life-changing as a lived mission. Roger Terry’s engaging voice ushers us so far in to the immediate experience of being a missionary we almost become part of the topography, here so flat “you can stand on a tuna can and see the back of your head.” I’ve been on a mission, and I don’t know a better way to go on one than to read Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary. —Steve Walker, professor emeritus of English, Brigham Young University

    That significance, this volume shows, is inextricable from the intricacy of its literary form and the audacity of its historical vision. This landmark collection brings together a diverse range of scholars in American literary studies and related fields to definitively establish The Book of Mormon as an indispensable object of Americanist inquiry not least because it is, among other things, a form of Americanist inquiry in its own right--a creative, critical reading of "America." Drawing on formalist criticism, literary and cultural theory, book history, religious studies, and even anthropological field work, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon captures as never before the full dimensions and resonances of this "American Bible."

    Though the ride was often rough, he spent the next five years feeling his way forward, finding a voice to speak the language of the tradition in his own distinct register. The twelve essays and short stories in Remember the Revolution chronicle those experiments, giving voice to the idealism, anxiety, and insight of a young Mormon writer. Whether imagining the experience of a Mormon Bollywood playback singer, giving the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin a seat in Primary, telling the story of the early Restoration through an imagined sequence of Joseph Smith’s anxious dreams, or writing an inverted theology in the form of spam emails, Goldberg grapples with ways Mormon thought can engage with the cultures around it and speak to the pressing questions simmering beneath the surface of the modern world. At turns sincere, satirical, surreal, and somber, Remember the Revolution is vital reading for anyone interested in the potential of a distinctly Mormon literature.