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Religion Dispatches - Religion Dispatches Religion Dispatches
  • Racial Justice
    • If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy
      If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy
    • ‘Pregnant Women’ or ‘People Who Can Get Pregnant’: How Do We Balance Recognition of Anti-Abortion Misogyny with the Erasure of Transmasculine People?
      ‘Pregnant Women’ or ‘People Who Can Get Pregnant’: How Do We Balance Recognition of Anti-Abortion Misogyny with the Erasure of Transmasculine People?
    • Who’s ‘Really’ Jewish: the Sefardi Floridian, the Ashkenazi Californian, or the New York Jew By Choice? ‘Authenticity’ is a Trap
      Who’s ‘Really’ Jewish: the Sefardi Floridian, the Ashkenazi Californian, or the New York Jew By Choice? ‘Authenticity’ is a Trap
  • Politics/Law
    • If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy
      If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy
    • ‘We Believe That God Has a Special Plan for Every Single Life’: Oklahoma’s Strict, Punitive, and Total Abortion Ban is Just the Beginning
      ‘We Believe That God Has a Special Plan for Every Single Life’: Oklahoma’s Strict, Punitive, and Total Abortion Ban is Just the Beginning
    • Don’t Buy Alito’s Assurances: Here’s What Happens Next After <em>Roe</em> Falls
      Don’t Buy Alito’s Assurances: Here’s What Happens Next After Roe Falls
  • The End of Roe
    • ‘We Believe That God Has a Special Plan for Every Single Life’: Oklahoma’s Strict, Punitive, and Total Abortion Ban is Just the Beginning
      ‘We Believe That God Has a Special Plan for Every Single Life’: Oklahoma’s Strict, Punitive, and Total Abortion Ban is Just the Beginning
    • Laugh at Tucker Carlson’s Tanning Testicles Doc All You Want, But the Bulging Muscles and Potent Sperm Imagery is a Fascist Dream
      Laugh at Tucker Carlson’s Tanning Testicles Doc All You Want, But the Bulging Muscles and Potent Sperm Imagery is a Fascist Dream
    • ‘Pregnant Women’ or ‘People Who Can Get Pregnant’: How Do We Balance Recognition of Anti-Abortion Misogyny with the Erasure of Transmasculine People?
      ‘Pregnant Women’ or ‘People Who Can Get Pregnant’: How Do We Balance Recognition of Anti-Abortion Misogyny with the Erasure of Transmasculine People?
  • Christian Nationalism
    • If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy
      If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy
    • ‘We Believe That God Has a Special Plan for Every Single Life’: Oklahoma’s Strict, Punitive, and Total Abortion Ban is Just the Beginning
      ‘We Believe That God Has a Special Plan for Every Single Life’: Oklahoma’s Strict, Punitive, and Total Abortion Ban is Just the Beginning
    • Laugh at Tucker Carlson’s Tanning Testicles Doc All You Want, But the Bulging Muscles and Potent Sperm Imagery is a Fascist Dream
      Laugh at Tucker Carlson’s Tanning Testicles Doc All You Want, But the Bulging Muscles and Potent Sperm Imagery is a Fascist Dream
  • Russia Invades Ukraine
    • Putin Theo-Propaganda Minister Kirill Invokes 600 Years of History to Lay Claim to Ukraine — Here’s What it Means
      Putin Theo-Propaganda Minister Kirill Invokes 600 Years of History to Lay Claim to Ukraine — Here’s What it Means
    • How Belief in Moscow as ‘The New Rome’ Explains Kirill’s Astonishing Declaration That ‘Russia Has Never Attacked Anyone’
      How Belief in Moscow as ‘The New Rome’ Explains Kirill’s Astonishing Declaration That ‘Russia Has Never Attacked Anyone’
    • Is This Tiny Divided Orthodox Nation the Next Front in Russia’s Religious War?
      Is This Tiny Divided Orthodox Nation the Next Front in Russia’s Religious War?
holly.welker@gmail.com'

Holly Welker

Holly Welker is the editor of Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage. Her poetry and prose have appeared in publications ranging from Seventeen to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought to Bitch to the New York Times.

(A)theologies, Archive, Racial Justice, Sex/Gender/JusticeApril 13, 2022

‘Always Pray to the Father’: Mormon Leader Calls Desire for Knowledge of Heavenly Mother ‘Arrogant and Unproductive’

By Holly Welker

In 1995, in a document called the Family Proclamation, leaders of The Church of Jesus…

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(A)theologies, OMFG, Sex/Gender/JusticeJanuary 15, 2020

Mormon Statement on Feminism is Relevant and Timely… But Only by Coincidence

By Holly Welker

“What is the Church’s stance on feminism?” This is the question addressed in a brief anonymous…

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History/Theology, OMFG, Sex/Gender/JusticeMay 7, 2019

LDS Church Rescinds Hurtful Marriage Policy Without Apology

By Holly Welker

Given the ease with which the discontinuation of this policy was accomplished—two pages, three signatures—it’s worthwhile to ask: why now?

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History/Theology, Sex/Gender/JusticeApril 8, 2019

LDS Leaders Owe Repentance and Apology for Cruelty to LGBTQ People and Their Children

By Holly Welker

While LDS leadership rescinded its prohibition on baptizing children of LGBTQ parents, they bizarrely claim that neither the church’s nor God’s will have changed. You can all but hear them say, “Look, don’t blame us for the fact that God finds your gayness abhorrent! We’re just messengers!” 

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History/Theology, OMFG, Sex/Gender/JusticeJanuary 4, 2019

Changes in Role of Mormon Women Can’t Be Discussed—But Let’s Discuss Them Anyway

By Holly Welker

It’s gaslighting, moral cowardice, and yet another betrayal to deny women’s anger and pain, only to go and make some of the changes women have sought while still explicitly denying that women ever had any sort of legitimate complaint.

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Politics/Law, Sex/Gender/JusticeSeptember 28, 2018

Kavanaugh Hearings Are a Commentary on Mormonism

By Holly Welker

I strongly suspect that what Senator Orrin Hatch found so objectionable about the Kavanaugh hearing was that women were allowed to ask questions of a man.

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Culture, OMFG, Sex/Gender/JusticeSeptember 14, 2018

Mormon ‘Humorist’ Robert Kirby Is Butt of His Own Dirty Joke

By Holly Welker

The problem, he writes, is that he “misjudged how she would take [his] sense of humor.” Really? Does he normally get a good response to asking women he’s just met to pretend they’re prostitutes?

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OMFGAugust 20, 2018

LDS Church Disavows “Mormon”-ism

By Holly Welker

I doubt that Latter-day Saints are any more likely in 2018 to renounce a practice ingrained over lifetimes than they were in 1982.

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Archive, OMFG, Sexuality/GenderJanuary 17, 2018

Meet the New (Straight White American Male) Mormon President

By Holly Welker

On Tuesday, Russell M. Nelson, a 93-year-old retired heart surgeon, was announced as the seventeenth…

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Archive, Culture, New Books, Sexuality/Gender, StoriesJuly 28, 2014

When Religion Becomes a Trap Rather Than a Safety Net

By Holly Welker

“My situation isn’t isolated to Mormonism. But to suggest that it doesn’t exist in Mormonism is just bullshit. Abuse of power happens in every religion.”

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